Guild Wars 2

If something is genuinely overpowered then over time it should become the dominant thing as people adopt the “if you can’t beat them, join them” strategy. Turtling, for example, was a boring as kitten strategy but after a while I’d say every guild with an ounce of organization was using it. When people realized that thieves could permanently contest supply camps, people started making thieves and every thief in my guild adopted that strategy.

Seeing as I haven’t seen an uptick on the number of eles in WvW, I can only surmise that while it is a useful ability, it doesn’t unbalance the class as a whole. In which case, tough, different classes have different advantages in different areas, this one just happens to be the eles.

Thrashbarg.9820:

Knasher.5607:

Does it disadvantage your team to the benefit of that persons team? If yes => tactic.

Cool, so fly-hacking, wall hacking, speed hacking, all valid tactics by that definition…..

Geez…..

I never said valid. Though in this specific case I think it is.

I don’t think it should be done per tick, as that favors the team that holds keeps overnight rather than the one which holds them during the day, when the upgrades actually matter. So I’d prefer a reward given per repelled attack or something. Other than that I agree.

mclovinballs.4031:

Someone clarify for me how sitting in the water not even touching garrison to contest it a tactic?

Does it disadvantage your team to the benefit of that persons team? If yes => tactic.

Syndic.4762:

Only a matter of time before WvW guilds start transferring off Blacktide. I’ve had too many guild leaders PM me about new server to conclude otherwise. Nobody except few guilds seems to be willing to tolerate Ruin bandwagoning.

People are focusing too much on ruin. They were a significant guild on Desolation, nobody can really deny that, but they are entirely insignificant on BT. BT would be winning with or without them and they bring nothing new to the server, the result would be much the same if they had transferred back to the NA ladder instead or just stopped playing altogether, so who really cares where they play?

The reason that people will leave BT is the same reason you don’t see many max level characters running around in the starting areas, there is no challenge to it. Some people enjoy a challenge, and they will be first to get bored and switch. And some people believe that being in tier 1 means something more than just having a larger group of players, and they will stay. But either way BT will equalize, just as Vizunah equalized. It will just take a little time to fix itself (though I predict less time than it did with Vizunah, so long as free transfers remain in place). We fought Vizunah two weeks in a row, the first week they had national holidays and really pulled out all the stops and it was a very tough match that we ultimately lost, the second we won by a large margin, is there anyone on Deso who enjoyed the second week more than the first?

Brunners.7251:

RUIN jumped on on the Thursday night of that match against Kodash, IIRC.

As far as I remember they switched over the course of a couple of days, but I don’t think they had a big impact on the end of that week so I tend to regard them as only switching on the weekend, when they actually got involved in WvW.

Ianervan.3415:

That’s true but you just dropped from t2 and could easily get back there. You were still top2 eng speaking server at the time, a former t1. You were also pretty much a Full server as well, which helps.

I think we would have gotten back there eventually, but not easily. The week ruin switched was the first week we played BT. BT were already a strong server back then, stronger than any other server we’ve faced apart from Vizunah when they had national holidays to play with, they were also already on the rise. Without ruin we would have lost that week, without a doubt, that would have put us down to tier 4 and I don’t know what would have happened after that.

But just to be clear here – I don’t think many had issues in RUIN actually joining Desolation in itself. Correct me if I’m wrong but most forum complaints were about nightcapping.

No it was more about American players playing on EU servers and that the language specific servers felt they couldn’t recruit in a similar fashion. I don’t want to drag that debate back up again though because it went nowhere, so I’ll leave it there.

Ianervan.3415:

Ok, I stand corrected then. So the pugs shifted the balance

Well I was a pug myself at the time so I don’t want to take all the credit, but I will.

Seriously though, it was down to a small group of players (I know players from iron were involved, and probably players from the closely allied guilds as well, I wasn’t in iron at the time so I’m not 100% sure) rearranging their schedule to stay up late and try and turn the server around.

Ianervan.3415:

RUIN on the other hand goes all the way to EU, joins none other than top eng speaking WvW guild (they could choose Deso or FS), and as soon as first competition comes up, jump the boat (supposedly).

To be fair ruin joined desolation when we were in tier 3 and the weekend they joined, the week before was the first match-up (as far as I can remember) since the weeklies began that we hadn’t come third (and even then it was a close fight between second and third). At the moment there are still ruin players on desolation but one of their leaders is clearly on BT, it is possible that they are switching over or it is possible that their leader switched so he could talk to the leaders on BT and see if any of them are interested in switching to balance BT and Deso, I know they have tried to recruit from opposing servers before (though I’m not sure why they would try in a week we are getting our kitten handed to us).

Either way as it stands it is all idle speculation at the moment.

If it turns out to be true, it won’t really affect me (as a Deso player that is). As far as I’m concerned the tier remains a function of the numbers of players and with fewer numbers we will simply drop down to a tier we are better able to compete in. Win lose or draw, I intend to have fun.

Ianervan.3415:

We don’t need to compare BT to Deso or Vizu here. Let’s use an extreme example. Do you really think that 20 players from best Vabbi guild would beat 20 players from top BT/Deso guild? Or even if we looked at 50 avg playrs. I don’t think so. That is not to say all skill is at the top but there’s surely more of it, not just numbers.

It would depend on your selection criterion. If you picked the 20 best players from BT and the 20 best from Vabbi, then you would expect the BT players to be better because you would expect a larger server to have a larger number of outliers to choose from. (By the same reasoning you would expect BT (or Deso) to have more bad players than Vabbi, so a match-up of the 20 worst players should result in a Vabbi victory).

On the other hand if you were to pick 20 random players from BT and 20 random players from Vabbi, then you would expect Vabbi to win. If for no other reason than the chances of picking players that are used to playing together is much higher with Vabbi. As well as the fact that Vabbi’s play-style is probably particularly suited to small group tactics.

Ianervan.3415:

Easy way to refute what you said is being online at server reset. All servers have maxed capacity in WvW (full maps). If your theory was true, every server would have the same amount of points every hour, for as long as all maps are full. This is never the case.

In a 1v1 match-up that would be a valid refutation of the theory, but in a 3 way fight it is quite a bit more complicated than that. It happens all the time that a single server could be fighting on two fronts, it is an expected part of a 3 way fight. Taking a single moment in time, even when all three servers are full, and trying to use it to prove a point is completely meaningless. If the maps were to remain full all the time and one server were to keep their lead constantly, then you could probably make that case, but you would need a much longer time period, without that you are simply jumping to conclusions.

DerCosinus.5964:

I´m sure that 90% of Europen-Region Servers would answer with “No!”

I’d be willing to bet that most of the EU servers would vote yes (assuming the question was asking in a less obviously biased fashion of course). What difference does it make to someone playing on Seafarers Rest (for example) if there are people playing on Desolation from NA. Unless people switch to them on mass they are never going to have the numbers to reasonably fight some of the larger servers. It is in their best interest to be in the largest pool possible so they have the greatest chance to play against servers that are at about the same level as them(as measured by the ranking algorithm, which measures player numbers more than skill), beyond that they shouldn’t really care.

During BWE3 there was 17 servers with a generalized language focus, 4 German, 3 French and 0 Spanish servers, now there are 14 generic servers and 13 language specific servers. The conclusion you can draw from this is that ANet underestimated how popular the language specific servers were going to be and had to add new ones in order to meet the demand, it also likely means that the language specific servers (especially Vizunah) have higher populations that other servers (and the queue data ANet released a few weeks ago seems to back this up). The language specific servers were given a huge advantage over any others because of this, it is far easier to find people willing to stay up and play late when your population is many times the size of the other servers.

Before you point out that Desolation is marked as full at the moment (as is Elona, Vizunah, Blacktide and one other), I’d remind you that full doesn’t actually indicate how many players are on a server. Before launch there were a number of posts describing how ANet could control the population that could play on a server dynamically and without restarting them. Nor does it indicate how many people play WvW. It is entierly possible that Desolation is still on a lower population than Vizunah, but higher than Gandara (which also had full status recently).

WvW is a matter of player numbers, it always has been. The only thing that has changed is that in the past it was just the language specific servers (and Far Shiverpeaks) that had the numbers to play in tier 1. Now Desolation and Blacktide do. In another month it is entirely possible a different set of servers will.

WvW didn’t stop when the language specific servers dominated. It hasn’t ended for servers playing in the lower tiers like Seafarers. And it won’t end on the language specific servers playing in tier 2. It isn’t any more or less fair than it was before the NA players transferred, it just isn’t biased as much towards the language specific servers any more. Asking to be transferred into a new pool isn’t asking for balance, or fairness or anything else, it is asking for the game to be changed so it is biased in your favor once again.

That being said, it is possible for tier 1 to be broken. Once a server gets to the very top, then there is no more up to go, no matter if it dominates there or not. And I’d imagine when that happens it damages the server in the second position (because it is just too good to drop down, so it gets crushed each week instead) and the server in the first (people making the queues unbearable as they transfer over, as well as the lack of challenge making it pointless). It’s way too early to say if that will happen though, but if it does it will be for the second time.

I’d be very hesitant of drawing any conclusions from this type of data in a three way match-up. If it was a two way fight then fair enough, the points could be taken as indicative of when one side is stronger than the other. But in a three way match-up, it doesn’t really express what goals or tactics the teams might be working towards.

Ashlinn.6094:

What i don’t understand is the fact that we have a US and an EU ladders . If the game is design to be play 24/7 then why don’t you make simple and create a World Ladder.

It is probably an issue of latency. If the servers were based in North America, then it would be pretty okay for anyone in Western Europe, the links between the two are pretty fast so it really doesn’t make a difference where the server is placed. As you go further east however, and especially into Russia, the connection will be going through many more links and the latency may be unbearable. On the other hand if people in Australia tied to play on a EU server then the latency would likely be equally unbearable.

I’d like to hear from someone in Australia or Russia who tried playing on the EU or NA servers. It is always possible that ANet planned for a worst case but that the latency in practice isn’t all that bad.

Creslin.1758:

So, back to the topic at hand, my opinion is that server rematching should not be viewed as a way to “move up the ladder,” instead it should be viewed as a way for servers to find matchups that result in awesome WvW. And once such a matchup is found, I don’t think it should be changed unless one server starts dominating. After all, when Ferg’s was “moving” around the server ladder in the rankings, WvW was terrible, but now that we are settled with our 2 other servers, it’s been great…why change it?

That is pretty much exactly how it actually works. Most of the time.

The one possible pitfall is for tier 1 and the bottom tier (so it is pretty good that you are finding that tier to be balanced), as regardless if a server dominates or is dominated, there simply isn’t any more up or down for a server to go.

Brunners.7251:

The thread is trying to display a page three that doesn’t exist.

Yep, I think it happens when a ton of posts are deleted, and therefore a lot in any thread that mentions Desolation recently :P.

Of course the only people who will see the fix are probably the ones who already know about it.

Snort.3698:

what IP’s are you pinging and where did you get the ip for the game server?

If you type /ip into the chat window I use the ip address that comes up. I am making the assumption that this is accurate but I should probably verify it by checking what addresses I’m connected to when in game. Also I’m not pinging them, either the servers don’t respond to ICMP echo requests or my ISP is blocking them somewhere along the way, but I haven’t had a lot of luck with ping. I am using traceroute instead, which isn’t being blocked on any of the hops it is making.

(Sorry I can’t post the ip I’m using, I’m writing this from work [looks around nervously for boss])

I miss them, I think there is a lot less of an emphasis on good defense when the maps aren’t full now that they are gone. Especially when the choice is between defending a single keep on one map or potentially easily taking a couple of keeps and towers on another.

Exewre.2837:

Lol an internet site
Keep your informatic tips and lessons
Just type a simple command in Dos. Period

Weris is correct, the servers are in Germany. If I run traceroute (or tracert if you are in dos) on the server ip I get a round trip time of about 30 milliseconds. (I’m in Europe). Comparatively the same command to the University of Texas, which is in Austin, gives a rtt of 120 ms and a server based in the New York area gives a rtt of 70ms. A 30ms rtt to Austin simply isn’t possible, in fact a new low latency fiber optic link between New York and London is currently being built which will give a rtt of about 62ms (a 5ms improvement). 30ms to anywhere in America, simply isn’t possible.

I am very much looking forward to a match between Blacktide, Desolation and Vizunah. I actually think it could be a very tough match-up and despite some of the things being thrown around this week, a very even one. My frank assessment of WvW, since the very start, is that it is primarily a numbers game, comparatively Blacktide has the numbers in the early morning, Vizunah during the day, and Desolation in the late night. As it stands, against Vizunah and Arborstone, they are both strongest at the same time, so their strengths counteract each others, leaving us free reign. Next week that could all change.

Plus, it will be pretty nice to play a server with a little stoicism again. Other than Blacktides very impressive defensive abilities, it was what I admired most about your server.

Wothan.4673:

Atm why this configuration of pop migration, and if we want to stay a only “french” or “german” serv, it will be almost impossible for us to come back in D1 sustainable. It’s not a problem, i’m don’t care about D1/D2 the fight quality is the same. just a fact.

To be honest, it was a little weird having three single time zone servers in the top tier to begin with. Even before the Americans came on the scene, you would have expected that servers whose populations span Europe to be able to keep a higher population in WvW for longer than any other. While there was a tendency for communities to organize around a single server, that was only ever going to be a piece of the total server community, the rest being people or guilds who chose independently. I suspect the main reason why the localized servers dominated was because ANet underestimated the relative interest in those servers, so prior to adding new localized servers, like Arborstone (and probably even after), the localized servers grew much larger than any of the rest. Excluding people outside Europe, the localized servers would have been at a distinct disadvantage anyway, I suspect, if not for the huge advantage they gained from population in-balance.

Gwal.2813:

I haven’t seen 0 post from FR complaining about nightcap.
we are complaining about oversea daycap.

But it’s like talking to a wall, all night long I have tried to explain (in a constructive way) why we were complaining, in the various threads closed one after one, but no one seems to understand our issue : I’ve only seen mocking, trolling, or out of topic answers…

Very well, in the interest of a constructive conversation and in order to understand your issue, allow me to ask this, what exactly is the difference between nightcappers and overseas players?

From my prospective there really isn’t one, the effect is the same. It doesn’t matter if it is someone who finishes work at 2am and hops on for a couple of hours or someone who finishes at 6 pm, us time. Vizunah were dominating Far Shiverpeaks by 150000 points at one point, so I doubt you had many people who were sacrificing their schedules to get up and maintain that, why bother when you are wining by such a margin? The only explanation is that either Vizunah has a large number of overseas players (hence the Canada rumor) or a large number of night workers. People deny the whole Canada thing, which is understandable as a factual statement, but I never really understood why it made a difference.

There is a difference in quantity alright, it is far easier for English speaking servers to recruit US members than it is for French servers. But that reasoning cuts both ways, if it is unfair because we have more nightcappers now, then it was equally unfair when the server with the largest nightcapping population was Vizunah. And most of the solutions to this new problem seem less about fixing the unfairness of nightcapping and more about restoring Vizunahs dominance, such as region locking the ladders or moving Desolation to an international ladder.

Hypothetically if every player on Ruin were to hop on a plane and come to the UK for jobs which allowed them to work hours such that their gaming time remains the same. From the French servers prospective the effect is the same, would that then be fair and if so why?

I’m asking this honestly because I haven’t seen it explained. In fact the only answer to this type of question I’ve seen runs along the lines of “if you don’t understand it, then I’m not explaining it to you” (from a different poster obviously). If you are truly interested in getting people to understand the issue from your prospective, then I’m certain the answers to these question will go a long way, at least for me, because they are the main thing which keeps me from taking your complaints all that seriously.

Cottage Pie.6215:

Indeed, the position for EU top spot (total points) since weeklies began has been constantly VS, with AS getting it last week and this week…?

Vs-Vs-Vs-Vs-Vs-Vs-As-?

Vizunah were back into their top spot after last week. So it should be
Vs-Vs-Vs-….-Vs-Vs-Vs-As-Vs-?

And the French servers complain about balance. Good lord…

At one point, for example when they were playing against FS and Riverside, they were winning their match-ups by about 150,000 points. To be honest I was really surprised how bitter some players on FS about night capping when we played them, they already had to put up with it for months.

jaxom.7469:

writing on forums that nightcapping should be adressed ?

not everybody is selfish you know ?

Frankly it’s the hypocrisy of it that annoys me. Feel free to have a look what Gwal though of nightcapping a month ago when his server was doing it to far shiverpeaks:

Nightcap is part of the game, wvwvw is 24/7, and although I admit it’s certainly not an “honorable” way to get the advantage, it’s legit, and it’s certainly better than the cheating some people of your server have resorted to.

Guess it stopped being legit when it was being done to his server instead.

jaxom.7469:

and if you guys don’t see the difference between 20 pugs sleeping late and a 100+ organised people guild just coming to be first easily ….

I doubt it was ever just 20 people and I doubt they were just sleeping late instead of being night workers who were just awake at that point anyway. Probably a lot of them didn’t stay in that long, why bother when the whole world has gone green.
In any case it sounds like you position is that nightcapping is unfair because our nightcappers outnumber your nightcappers, the identical position we were in two months ago.

Gwal.2813:

We won because of nightcap with people from our timezone : we stood up at night. -> any server can counter that by doing the same, Elona Reach proved it by beating both FR servers !

whereas oversea recruitment is impossible to counter if you are a localized server.

Why do you think ANet created a separate EU ladder in the first place then ?

The Vizunah nightcap would have been equally impossible for us to counter because while Vizunah probably have a large contingent of night workers who prefer to play on a french server. Desolation has a lower population and without a language barrier most people prefered to play on the NA servers (rather than do PvE alone). But hey, I guess fairness equality only matter when you aren’t winning. Vizunah dominated tier 1 by being larger than any other server out there, at one point you had queues going 500 people long lasting 23 hours a day.

You are asking ANet to change the rules, not to restore fairness and equality across servers, that was never there to begin with, but to restore the dominance of the localized servers.

Last time Desolation were in tier 1, we got stomped because we didn’t have nightcappers like Vizunah. Where were you asking for a FAIR and EQUAL chance then?

Its midnight GMT, the clocks have gone back now. Same thing with the acheivments, they used to reset at 1am, now they reset at midnight.

SpaceCowboy.1398:

That being said, let’s not make this about the Thief profession! Perhaps there’s a Necromancer that’s just tired of condition damage, and would like to snipe people from the wall. Well, here’s your Sniper Rifle sir! Maybe there’s a ranger that has realized that Legolas is too androgynous and bows are for sissies. Well, here’s a Charzooka for you!

Perhaps there is an elementalist who feels too squishy when trying to fight melee in light armor, let them wear heavy. Maybe there is an warrior who is tried of being visible, let them use stealth.
Hell why do we even have professions in the first place? ::rolleyes::

Karthaugh.6532:

You really think a 3 second cast time would create such an issue?

I suspect it would. You don’t get a lot of advanced warning of incoming forces before the waypoint becomes contested. Especially if they are using mesmers to move their force around. And what little time you do have is usually spent trying to assess if you need to break off what you are doing and get back.

Obviously an easy fix to this specific issue would be to make the waypoint take 3 seconds longer before it comes contested. However my main point is that it would change the situation more than you suggest.

In any case I really don’t see the upside of this. Encouraging small scale PvP is good, but it would, by definition discourage (however slightly) the larger scale battles. I hate to say this, but if you are looking for small scale PvP fight, there is already a mode specifically dedicated to that.

“putting a cast time on WPing wouldn’t hurt anyone, and would actually force people to PvP more often. "
It would hurt teams who buy a waypoint in their keep and post lookouts so they have a chance to port players back and defend a keep before it becomes contested.

eiennnoai.9870:

We’ll see how it’ll be starting sunday night/monday morning but I’m pretty sure Deso will be able to tick @600+ this time.

Well the week hasn’t even started yet and Vizunah (assuming that’s where you play) are just about to get a well fought victory, and you are calling the match over already…

eiennnoai.9870:

I don’t know, you could try to put 3W advertisment in PvE maps chat, creating a special operation or whatever maybe ? Which is what VS has been doing. There’s no need for more players, just a better %age of people doing 3W in such cases…

People put up calls on our maps also. Desolation is still very much a PvE orientated server, ever since we were getting stomped by other servers each week and other than a small group of our more stubborn players, a lot of people just gave up on that part of the game. Hopefully over time they will try it again, till then we can only work with what we have.

Anyway it’s been a hell of a week. I’d be surprised if we manage to turn it around now, but up till Friday it could have gone either way. Hopefully this finally puts an end to the confrontational attitude between our two servers and we manage to keep next weeks match-up thread open for a full week. The new Desolation can be beaten and Vizunah did it the very first time they faced us. Just hopefully not the second :P.

It is probably a matter of prospective, I’m guessing you are coming from a server which has very long WvW queues and doesn’t really need more people joining up and not contributing fully. On the other hand my server has a large PvE population but rarely has queues on more than one of the borderlands (and usually only 5 minute queues). From my prospective, encouraging players who might have given up on WvW is still a good thing.

I see where you are coming from, I just think that on most servers ANet are more interested in getting people involved in WvW and I don’t think they will take any steps to compromise that.

One of the monthly achievements is WvW kills, it’s set to a very low that you should be able to get in a day with very little effort. ANet are clearly doing whatever they can to encourage people to join into WvW and maybe discover they want to keep playing while there, I doubt they would be interested in anything which would give people an avenue of avoiding WvW.

tita.6358:

about Deso getting the outnumbered debuff on 2 maps all the time at night (or NA prime time). that’s what you get for moving your whole ruin zerg from map to map every 15 minutes to go to undefended doors. we don’t move our whole server when switching map.

Actually you do. Earlier in the week we were attacking one of your towers near your spawn, we actually managed to get the doors opened and head up to your towers, when suddenly a wall of blue descended on us from your spawn and wiped us out of your tower, before going on to take a largely undefended keep from Arborstone, who had just now gained the outmanned buff.

I’m not complaining by any means, I think it’s a valid strategy. The only thing stopping Vizunah using it at the moment is that they have the numbers right now that moving people around maps will only leave people stuck in queues.

basjubowe.1024:

Dude, be honest a second please.
Your server is full, so i don’t know by which miracle VS can be more populated than DS.

The servers in Guild Wars since the very start have been designed with a variable cap. Basically ANet has set a limit on the number of people that can join before the server is marked as full and every so often this limit is increased to allow more people to join it, up to some unknown maximum. They designed it this way to try and force people to spread out across the servers. What this means is that full on Desolation may not mean the same number of players as full on Vizunah. I’ve been keeping an eye on the servers listings just out of interest. On Tuesday 4 servers were marked as full, yesterday there were no full servers, today only Desolation is, sometime during that period extra capacity was added to the servers that needed it. There may have been multiple time periods where Vizunah needed extra capacity and Desolation didn’t, the only conclusion you can draw from a full status, is that there are a lot of people who want to transfer over.

I’m going to be sorry to see the orbs go. The buffs were overpowered sure, but they were necessary to bring one of my very favorite mechanics to WvW. My very favorite moment in WvW was attacking a keep, realizing that you didn’t have the numbers to actually take it, so focusing on the alter instead. Followed by a mad cap run across the map with the forces from both teams chasing you while you make off with the orb. The orb being any less valuable would make moments like that impossible…

I still like my idea to change the orbs into double edged swords. If the orb ate supply for example, then to keep the orb you might need to hold onto the supply camps or two keeps on a map and move it between them every so often. If you don’t then your keep run out of supply and will become more vulnerable to being siege and the orb resets. Then you could have ambushes set up to capture the orb from a server that is about to move it or alliances could see servers sharing the orb between them rather than see it reset to the third, and other tactics like that.

Obviously only after the hacking is fixed though.

Gwal.2813:

Why a server with more dedicated, more wvw oriented, and overall with better players, (which is the case of Vizunah, Arborstone and Elona I believe) should be behind in the ladder just because they don’t speak English ?

I’m really interested to know if this is the majority opinion on those servers. That the reason they were in tier 1 is because they are just better than everyone else? That the fact that Vizunah, at least at one point, had 500 person queues and full maps 23 hours a day was just a coincidence and that the real reason that they dominated tier 1 for a month is just because nobody else was quite as good as them? Perhaps it was a coincidence that the week Elona won just happened to be the same week that parts of Germany was on holidays?

The truth is that WvW ranking has never really been a measure of skill. It plays a part to be sure, but a minor one in comparison. Maybe the players on Vizunah or Arborstone or Elona really are just better, there is no real way to tell by looking at the data we are given. The only real thing it measures is the total amount of man hours people are playing WvW. Whether those hours come from a larger community (Vizunah), public holidays (Elona) or overseas players (Desolation), makes no difference. The goal of server ranking isn’t that the servers with the best players are competing, the goal is that the matchups be competitive and you can’t look at the current score in tier 1 and tell me that isn’t competitive.

Well to be fair 120ms isn’t all that noticable in a game like GW. And I’d be willing to bet the connections of most people (except for maybe those that live in Germany) wouldn’t get 30 ms to the server, my ISP blocks traceroute so I ran it from work, there my connection is better than 99% of my country; and yet I’m not allowed to use it for anything fun.

Plus the connection to the server is probably only the first part of the story. What I mean is, if I am routed to my closest server in Germany and my friend is routed to his closest in Texas, how do we play together?

Actually come to think of it I’d be surprised if they are really using anycast, when I think about it the whole thing is sounding more and more complicated. I’m thinking now that whatever database that whatsmyip is basing its geolocation on just isn’t correct.

No the servers are based in Germany. If I do a traceroute on my connection to that ip I get a round trip time of about 30ms, compared to about 120ms for one to the University of Texas, which is also in Austin. Or ~60ms for a connection to a server based in New York. 30ms to America just isn’t possible. For comparison currently a new transatlantic connection between London and New York is being set up that offers a latency of 59.6ms (a 5.2ms improvement over the old connection) at a cost of $300 million for stock traders. If ANet really had a 30ms connection to America, they could make millions off it :P .

The ip address that ANet is using is called an anycast address. A computer sends a packet to a group address, and it is then routed to the nearest node that is part of that group. It is actually pretty common for DNS services and large content delivery services.

eiennnoai.9870:

Germany and France have huge communities and they’re the most dedicated one at that as we can see with nightcapping mobilization and other kind of tough organization no other server was able to do. They have more than a right to be able to compete about anything else, what they’ve been doing all those past week.

People who are still playing on Henge of Denravi or Eredon Terace are dedicated. Vizunah has never been stomped and has never been out of tier one, I don’t think Arborstone lost a match until they got into tier 1. Even the matches Vizunah or Arborstone have lost have been, as far as I know, pretty close. If you’re part of a server that got its kitten handed to it week after week, droped tier by tier, and large parts of their community giving up on WvW, and you still log on, then you are dedicated. The players on Desolation who stuck with it when this happened to them are dedicated. We haven’t had a chance to see if the players on Vizunah or Arborstone are dedicated yet.

On the WvW forum on those threads that cover the weekly matchup, debate between the three servers can get pretty heated. I don’t know if there has been an active one that a moderator hasn’t had to close and clean or just lock at one point or another. If commentators had the ability to see that the majority of their peers down-voted an inflammatory comment, then they might feel less inclined to respond. Why point out how stupid something is when clearly everyone already knows. Hopefully this might prevent threads from quickly descending into trolling and sniping for a change.

There seems to be something already in place with the +1 thing, but I’ve no idea what that actually does.

warboss.1362:

and clueless people on Deso saying " best fight ever keep it up!!" you should all be ashamed.

Ever consider that the reason people are going out of their way to say nice things about their enemy is because this is the third thread on this match-up, one of which was deleted instead of being just locked, and people are trying to encourage others to be civil by leading from example, in order to keep this thread open. There were people from all three servers doing it in the first thread (including people from Deso when we were coming third).

Tips? Well the first would be if you are returning to a camp too soon after it has been taken then the overseer will have a buff making him immune to all damage but condition damage. Generally you want to avoid this as it will take so long for him to die that their defenders will be upon you before you kill him. If you are running in a group it is a good idea to try and have shared speed buffs, if you see an enemy zerg, run away. Way point travel is free, if you look like you are about to be overrun, map back. If you are playing during the hours without a queue, map hop. Eventually your enemy will get annoyed and try and set up defenses, it can be handy to work with the person coordinating the main force on the map, so when they try that strategy you might be able to call down your zerg and dissuade them from ruining your fun, to that end if you see a large group of enemy players heading towards one of your towers, announce it in team chat (they will want to know which team and the number of players).

A lot of servers have a supply capping team in order to disrupt the supply getting into keeps and make them easier for them to be taken. If you get a chance I’d try and get on that team. Often you will get karma, not only from the camps you are flipping but also from whatever dolyacks happen to be there at the time.

Well just to point out the obvious, it is a little unusual to have the top 3 servers in Europe being language specific. For the most part your players are confined to a single timezone, compared to almost every other server who has a player base split across Europe (before the NA players got involved). Obviously there was some coordination for certain gaming communities to pick certain servers, but that is always going to be a small fraction of the total players, the rest who just picked whatever server at random. All other things being equal you would have expected that geographically diverse servers would have had an advantage over single timezone ones. One would suspect the main reason this wasn’t the case was that ANet underestimated the interest in language specific servers in comparison to the multilingual ones. The result of this is that some servers ended up with player numbers far outreaching the numbers on the others, in the graphs that ANet released, at that point Vizunah had queues reaching 500 people, across all the borderlands, much longer than any other server (obviously there is a limit to the number of players in a map, but with queues that long, according to the queue data, Vizunah was able to keep its maps full 23 hours a day). Was it “fair” to the other servers in the EU bracket that Vizunah just outnumbered everyone else? Maybe not, and if you asked me in the first week I would have said definitely not, but in the end I realized that tier 1 doesn’t mean you have better players, or will have better matches, it just means that only the servers you are matched with have the numbers to give you a challenge (obviously there is more to it than just numbers, but they are by far the largest deciding factor). At the time I accepted that my server wasn’t tier 1 and I just hoped we would drop as quickly as possible, rally, and then fight our way into whatever tier we actually belonged in.

Now the equation has changed, the language specific servers that once had an “unfair” advantage now have to face off against servers with a different advantage. Maybe that advantage is unfair, but it is no more unfair than the one the language specific servers were given (or at least some of them, there are always servers that are less popular for whatever reason). Obviously there is a certain part of your playerbase who would prefer to play on a tier 1 server and live under the illusion that they are “better” than the players in the lower tiers. But for anyone who is serious about WvW the only thing that matters is that whatever tier you are in, you are matched against servers which reasonably equal to you, so that fights can remain competitive and fun and not be decided by Monday.

I doubt it was culling as you’d need a larger force before that kicked in. It could have been lag or some sort of server glitch. I was escorting dollies the other day (I am a classy gentleman after all), and at one point the dolly teleported 2 meters down the road. At first I thought it might be something I said, perhaps one of my bad jokes that ran on for far too long, but in the end I decided it was most likely a glitch. If npcs can glitch around then it is reasonable to assume that people can inadvertently do it too.

I wouldn’t worry about it though. People who regularly hack will have tons and tons of reports against them and there is always going to be a certain rate of false positives (and angry people who can’t understand how they died). If you stay at having 1 report I doubt you’ll even make ANets radar.

Thorvald.5432:

Genocide.4506:

Last thing we’d expect is at the last 24 hours the 2 french servers decide to ally up again lol.

Don’t worry. It is almost impossible for it to happen again this week. Too much competition, tension and drama between AS and VS

Well there is always next week. If you look at the score from that mos website, even when Desolation were coming last, we were still gaining more rating points due to the difference in the score not being reflected by the difference in points. Same thing happening in tier 2 where Elona are losing points despite coming first. Looks like it is going to be VS vs AS vs Deso for at least another week.

Well you certainly aren’t the first person to comment on how unhelpful the out-manned buff is. I really do think ANet needs to put something in to allow servers to catch back up, otherwise you can have servers giving up by Monday, and to help out servers during times they are outnumbered.

As for the orbs, I like the mechanic they bring to the game, so I’d like them to stay as something worth striving for. I don’t think people would be really all that pushed if they just switched the orb and out-manned buff (a frequent suggestion in other posts on this). Rather than removing their buffs I’d like to see them become double edged swords, sure they let you kick some kitten in the field but they also make you vulnerable. For example if the orbs consumed supply in order to function (and reset after a certain amount of time if there was no supply to consume), in order to keep the orb you need to hold at least one of the supply camps feeding it the majority of the time or move it to another keep every so often to let the first one recover. If you don’t you are liable to lose both the orb and the keep you have it in.

Starting out I’d advise you to head towards the commanders, choose one and right click on their profile pick and join their squad. Remember the name of their character and watch out for their orders in the chat window, otherwise just try and stay close to them and they will lead you into fights. A lot of the bigger WvW guilds use some sort of voice comms for coordination, so if you see people posting up teamspeak or mumble servers, feel free to join them. Try not to head around on your own, you will run into at least small groups and die quickly.

There are 4 types of capture points on a map, there are guards (which is a single guy standing on his own), supply camps (a couple of guards but no walls), towers (a single wall around a capture point) and keeps (two walls around a capture point). If you go into a supply camp, try and pick up supply and then use it to build siege when you need to.