Showing Posts For Macilien.3078:
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As it is now anyone who can see a guild bank section can edit its label and this change is not logged anywhere. This creates the problem that some individuals use these labels to post insults, obscenities and racism. Support is not much of a help either as they refuse to reveal who made these edits. This is quite frustrating as we don’t want to deny most of our guild members to use the guild bank, but might end up doing so.
The simplest solution I see is requiring the ‘Edit Message of the Day’ permission to edit the labels and logging them either in the guild or bank log and in absence of these changes allow support to reveal who did the edits.
The main incentive I want to give is to go out and kill attacking players, so this will result in the defender attacking if possible instead of just stalling, which sounds like a good thing to me.
The way you describe it offense is the only valid way to play WvW, but in my eyes defending should also be encouraged as this is what ultimately leads to fights, otherwise you end up with an EotM-like karma train.
As it is now there is less personal reward in defending an objective than in attacking. To reduce this gap I will outline a system that tracks and rewards efforts to upgrade and defend objectives. The system is guild-based, but could be adapted for individuals.
1. Contribution
Every objective your side owns will track how much your guild contributed to maintaining the objective. Things that are counted are:
- escorting dolyaks
- repairing walls
- placing and building siege
- killing enemy players in the area of influence of the objective (i.e. objective aura range)
killing players can be modified by where they are killed (e.g. more contribution for killing players outside the walls than letting them break through)
Contribution decays by a certain percentage after a set amount of time and is completely lost if the objective falls. It is not lost if you leave the map since it only remembers your guild. Contribution is gained for all guilds you’re in, not only for the one you represent. If your guild has the highest contribution for an objective it can claim the objective even if it is already claimed.
2. Points
At the end of each tick every guild will get the sum of its modified contribution over all objectives as points.
Contribution can be modified by:
- objective’s tier
- installed upgrades
- claimed by guild
Points are used for rewards and will decay over time if using a system to unlock rewards.
3. Rewards
There are several options here that come to my mind:
- guild bonuses (similar to the old server bonuses, you can unlock things like additional magic find, wxp and wvw reward track points for all members of your guild)
- wvw upgrade (similar to how you can buy for example guild catapults for favour, you could use the points to buy objective upgrades or guild siege blueprints)
There are likely some other things people would like to see as rewards.
For me a lot depends on the actual implementaion. If you can repair siege only when it took no damage and was not used for something like 20 seconds (to account for treb vs treb) I see no problem with repair hammers.
I’m just amazed how some people consider their local election rules universal. Just because you are satisfied by the single option which has the most votes doesn’t mean everybody else has to.
On top of that the options are comparable, so if you voted for 6 month, but that’s off the table it’s reasonable to assume that you pick the highest remaining option this way you ultimately end up with 2 month.
There may be 84.1% who didn’t vote for 2 month, but they split up in a special way, 38.1% wanted less than that and 46% wanted more, so neither is more than 50%.
The issue I find far more interesting is how the results look for EU and NA separately. I see people complaining about stale matchups, which looks like an NA thing to me. Our server (EU) faced 8 different servers since linking started, so I wouldn’t mind something like 1 month for NA and 3 month for EU happening.
That’s why it is hypothetical. If you want real numbers at this point in time (35.8%=1, 26.9%=3, 14.9%=2, 10.6%=6, 6.9%=ignore, 4.9%=4).
Does 1 month win or do you take the weighted average which is about 2.5 months?
We take the weighted average of all voters which is 2.5 months or 10 weeks.
Another option would be a median, which is currently 2 month. This way 53.3% voted for no more than 2 month and 60.3% voted for at least 2 month.
I’m wondering what happens if the poll shows different preferences for EU and NA, as both regions performed very differently in the past as far as match diversity is concerned.
Just wondering, do any of you know why dbl was designed the way it was?
In my eyes DBL was designed to create a more strategic approach to WvW, especially in terms of deployment. In the current maps you can reach every objective in a very short time so there is no incentive to do anything other than forming a big blob and roll from objective to objective. In DBL a smart opponent can make a blob chase one group while the other can cap objectives and thus making a monoblob much less effective and this was especially true before some changes early on, like moving the attacker waypoint from the spawn towers to the keeps which opened up way too much of the map to the attacker just for taking a keep or like downgrading once solid walls to these flimsy barricades, which made towers nearly completely irrelevant in a strategic sense.
It would be nice to know the exact conditions for earning the personal reward.
Guild Rush:
There is some delay between crossing the finishing line and receiving your personal reward. The delay seems not (entirely) time based, but also takes other players crossing the finishing line into account. Personal rewards are flushed out if the mission is successfully completed for the guild, but seems to be lost if the mission fails during the delay.
Guild Trek:
We sometimes do one easy location at the start to ensure that everyone gets their personal reward and it sometimes happens that a few people don’t get their rewards despite standing right on the symbol when it’s activated. This only seems to happen when there are a lot of people (15+) on a single location. Usually this is not much of an issue as there are some more locations to get the reward.
It worked for me by writing it like this: “…gw2.exe” -log.
Here’s my log, hope it helps.
Attachments:
For me it doesn’t load even after waiting over half an hour.
The problem is related the scoring mechanism used by Anet: I just wrote a big long post on it.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Error-in-WvW-Glicko-Scoring/first#post5976718
The image at the bottom show how the sine function punishes servers trying to push up and allows weakers servers to keep pulling them down.
To compare any two servers, you want a line of recent matches that connects them. The current problem is that there is no such line for some servers and your suggestion won’t fix this. It may establish some new lines simply by making the ranking more volatile, but this will like result in bigger gaps between tiers in the future.
I’m not an expert, but as far as I can tell the sine is just used to determine the degree of a servers win/loss, this value is then fed into the glicko algorithm to determine the points each server gets for the matchup, so the sine itself does not determine the points each server gets.
I’m amazed that it took you just a few posts to get from a technical suggestion to server bashing. Next time how about you start your own thread if you have nothing to contribute.
Well, if one looks at the NA T3 match last week, with SoS dropping to T3 and obliterating the other servers on that tier, that is what will happen. If you do as you suggest the lower tier servers would just give up and WvW will lose more players. It is not isolation, it is the T1 servers overstacking and trying to buy as many guilds as they can.
The only way A.Net can prevent this is by forcing guilds onto other tiers and servers and that will not happen.
Even if ANet solved the problem you see, how would you know it was solved if these servers are stuck in their tiers?
A big problem I see with the current matchmaking system is that once there is a gap of more than 120 points between two adjacent tiers, it completely prevents any exchange between these tiers. If this happens over several month you can’t tell which tier’s servers are actually better since this time might include a shift in population or balance patches.
A simple way to fix this is to move each server’s rating by a small percentage towards the average rating. This wouldn’t change the order of the servers, but would over time reduce gaps unless they are reinforced by a matchup.
So let’s see if I get this right:
- someone posted some obsolete items with no use (i.e. junk) on the TP for 450 gold
- these items were bought with RMT gold
- some of the gold was removed but the player got to keep 166 gold for junk
- and now that player is angry that he didn’t immediately get his junk back, too?
I wonder what would happen if ANet decided to simply remove obsolete items from the game, would anybody actually notice or care?
However, I think people are just dissatisfied with how this event was implemented. Half the fun of an achievement or reward is in the process of getting it. You get a sense of accomplishment when done and the prestige of displaying the fruits of your labour. Yes, you can simply just buy the drinks and skip the grind, but that seems to diminish the value of it. If there is an achievement, I want to achieve it not simply purchase it,
I enjoyed making my legendary weapon. I enjoyed making mawdrey and my spinal back piece. Those still required a grind but the they were fun to work towards. This shoulder achievement is not. I’ve done the winter JP close to 500 times, I’ve amassed 6000 presents and I’m still only half way to the needed 12k. It’s been exceptionally boring and tedious. At this point, although it’s feasible for me to complete, I just don’t want to do this anymore. It’s not fun, it feels like work, actually worse than work cause that at least gives me some variety.
It’s not the end of the world and anet certainly isn’t obligated to do anything for the holidays let alone offer a new skin. They could make the drink requirement 30k if they wanted. But as players, I think we should offer our feedback about the experience. In this case it’s been generally negative.
For me it is fun to set myself a daily goal and it is satisfying to meet it and in my eyes it is far better than hoping (mostly in vain) for a random drop. Of course if you just drop gold on it upfront it’s far less satisfying, but that’s not the only way to do it, you can set yourself a partial goal and then buy the rest.
No, the collection as means of acquisition was the “derandomization”.
It seems like everyone who compares this skin to Nightfury forgets the rest of the collection exists. There’s an item you buy, and there’s three items you craft. That’s where the gold cost belongs.
I’m not sure whether you are familiar with the concept of derandomization, so I’ll give a short example: instead of having a 0.01% chance to get an item for an action (e.g. opening a container) you get a guaranteed token and once you have 10,000 tokens you can trade them for the item. That’s exactly what changed from Halloween to Wintersday.
I neglected the other parts of the recipe/collection, because there was not much of a structural change.
The thing I disagree with is the theory that ANet makes you grind. The decision to grind is yours not theirs. Nothing stops you from playing as you want during Wintersday and buy the drinks you miss if you want the skin or sell them if you rather make some gold.
In fact getting 10k drinks is pretty much the derandomized version of getting the Batwing Brew for the Halloween skin and I find it much more preferable as it spreads out the benefits and doesn’t limit it to a few lucky people.
There are several ways to grind in this game, but it’s always the players’ choice to do it. Most things can be obtained by playing as you like and then trading for them, but if you really want to remove even the option to grind, you can use diminishing returns much stronger by reducing the average drop of every activity by 10% every few repetitions, I just doubt that this would be very popular.
It was much easier to simply remove those achivements with 10k drinks and food since day 1 of Wintersday. That way there would have been no hacking, no exploiting, no bans, and no flaming in forums.
If you think this argument through you’ll end up removing everything that requires the slightest bit of effort, it’s like telling people not buy expensive things to not attract thieves.
The thing that is expensive is not scribing itself, but wanting to have it right now. Think
6 – 12 month ahead, things like coarse sand, linseed oil, resonating slivers and pigments are only used for guildhall upgrades and scribing so the price will inevitably drop to an acceptable level.
Imagine if a player could leave the guild and take the workshop upgrades with them to their new guild.
You mean someone like the guild leader?
1. Queue next upgrade
Especially when an upgrade needs the maximum amount of Aetherium that you can store it would be really useful to select an upgrade so that it automatically happens when all requirements are met.
2. Highlight upgrades/materials
There are quite a lot of materials that you can donate to the treasury so it usually involves a lot of communication so that everyone knows what will be used for the next upgrade, for some future upgrade or not at all. It would be much easier if you could just highlight some upgrades or a specific material so that people can focus on donating this instead of something that won’t be used for a long time.
3. Enable/disable donations for an upgrade/materials
It would be great to have an option to disable donations for upgrades that your guild is not planning to make, e.g. War Room upgrades in a guild that doesn’t play WvW. Similarly it would be great to disable a material if you collect something else that requires the same resources, e.g. disable Green Wood Planks, Glass mugs and coarse paper if you collect extra-coarse sandpaper.
On the other hand if you collect materials for a line of upgrades, e.g. Objective Auras, you have to build one first to unlock the next so you can collect donations for it. It would be helpful if you could gather materials for the next upgrade you’re planning even before you unlocked it.
4. Loaning materials
I sometimes find myself in the position that I could donate most of the materials required for an upgrade, but don’t do it because this way I’d end up for paying for half of the guildhall just by myself. An option to loan materials so that I can start the upgrade right away and give my guild members a way to donate at their own pace would help very much. An even bigger advantage would be, if you could decide whether you want the material you loaned or its components back, this would help for example with paper where you need a scribe to produce it, this way you can get back the wood etc. you used to make it. It would also help with components that are not tradable, like the components for Ley-Line Infused Tools.
When will be the first regular guild mission reset after HoT launch?
Yes, there are German servers, but this is referring to the main language of the sever and not the nationalilty of the server. Anyone, anywhere, whether they come from one of the German speaking countries or not, can join such servers – and even form guilds where German is not their main language of communication. This is the same for whatever language is the main one for a server and certainly not particular to the German servers.
Of course everyone can join a German server, but what is the point of doing so if you don’t speak the language and there are other servers where you actually understand people. There are a variety of reasons for people to pick one server over another, but to balance WvW should not be one of them, ANet should provide a system that results in balanced matchups, so players don’t have to worry about their server choice.
I like to use German servers as example because most German speakers concentrate in one time zone, while French and Spanish is also common outside of Europe (e.g Canada and Latin America).
Sure, most players are from Germany I would imagine, but this is all beside the point in this regard because WvW is part of a world-wide system where all servers are scored on equal terms.
A weighted tick would still treat all servers equally just different than they are treated now.
Any alternative to this that builds on notions of area restrictions or national or regional biases – or that uses a scoring system that essentially means that equivalent contributions will not be of equal value for those who play off-peak hours – will unhinge the cornerstone of playing on equal terms, when and where you want in this game.
But as it is now your contribution is already worth less if you play during peak hours. The main problem I see is that the greatest volatility happens when the least players are around so it seem quite natural to me to damp this down.
Of course you can use other methodes like taking the median score instead of the average (our current score is the average score times the number of ticks, which is a constant and since the scale is completely arbitrary any constant factor is irrelevant) or a combination of the two (i.e. ignore the top and bottom x% of all ticks), but even then I’d still prefer a population weight in it.
Although I may not agree with everything you propose, I think discussion of the options is constructive (although I am not holding my breath for changes). As people have been saying, the expansion should shake things up at least.
Well I read somewhere that they’re working on the issue, so I’m curious how that turns out.
All servers are international. If you are fortunate enough to have a server in the language you prefer and in a nearby location, then that is great, but by virtue of this you may also have a greater challenge with coverage. Leave it, work to improve coverage, or just accept that night coverage is not your strength.
It’s not like that the community decided to make some servers into unofficial German servers, this is an official distinction, which results in structural differences (e.g. available coverage). A weighted tick would address that, it would still give the side with the greater coverage an advantage as they can raze t3s and upgrade their own structures uncontested, but it wouldn’t be as bad as it is now.
It sounds like you are getting fair matchups when you play during your prime time hours. If you don’t care about rank, then the unbalanced off hour matchups that you complain about should be less of an issue for you.
We are currently getting one of two tiers, in the upper tier are the fun and challenging matchups, were we get to actually get to fight something, but we still lose ranking points due to our night coverage. The lower tier is extremely boring as we hardly get any fights and if we do they learn very fast and avoid us, but we still loose ranking points because we can’t keep that dominance up during the night. Unfortunately we now keep getting the lower tier matchup most of the time which is neither fun for us nor most of our opponents.
As far as ticks goes, I would just like similar capturing to have similar benefits regardless of time of day. If you leave your maps unattended, and lose many ‘daytime’ gains, this is working as designed (at the moment). If a dozen players or whatever are taking over half your assets because you can’t muster enough appeal to get half that many players of your own on defense – then that is on you. If you mean that smaller groups’ actions are less valued, it would still mean that those who play when fewer play (i.e., often ‘off’ hours) are still not being rewarded on equal terms for their playtime.
As I said a weighted tick means that each players contribution is valued equally. Imagine a 30 men guild zerg, first when all maps are full, they can make certainly a contribution but none that will decide the matchup, now image that same guild zerg when only 10 people are on the other servers, they can conquer everything with little to no opposition, so if you want equal rewards as you say you have to scale it down for the later group.
The more important thing is that you do not have to stay on a German server if you do not like its 24h coverage. People choose their servers for all sorts of reasons. If you choose a German server because you prefer the language but also are of the opinion that the language is a factor in limiting 24h coverage – then you have to weigh the pros and cons. You could prefer the former or the latter and stay or go, respectively,
So you’re pretty much declaring all national servers pointless and we should leave them if we want to be competetive? I don’t care much where our server is ranked as long as it ensures that we get fair and fun matchups.
- or, if you want to live with both, you could work towards recruiting oceanics.
I don’t want our server to be the top nightcap server, I want fair and fun matchups which the current system does not provide.
To want to, on the other hand, devalue every player’s contribution who plays at an ‘off’ time is not a good solution.
The point of a weighted tick is that groups of equal size can have an equal impact no matter when they can play.
Well because it is indeed a fact that no matter where you are located, you have equal opportunity to access any server. Regardless of what language you speak. It would likely cause some communication issues. That doesn’t change the fact that everyone has equal opportunity to access to every server.
The implication that this fact has any practical relevance is still ridiculous. Most people simply won’t join a server if they can’t properly communicate with most of the server’s population, especially not if that server is traditionally weak during their playtime, but if it is all the same to you, why don’t you join a German server right now?
All servers are open 24h and have equal opportunity to diversify their coverage – regardless of language and EU/US server location.
This statement is outright ridiculous, 95% of all German speakers live in Europe, even if you consider people who learned German as a foreign language still a vast majority lives in Europe. If you look at English on the other hand there are many more time zones with people who can communicate in English, so how can you consider this equal opportunity?
It has to be over a year old, maybe two. We were discussing scoring and the thought of score based upon players on a map was brought up. The dev didn’t like the idea that a massive blob could flip an entire map and then leave the map while intimidating any who entered the map.
If I was good at searching three years of posts I’d find it.
I remember too a dev saying about how they didn’t want the outnumbered buff to be buffed in such a way that would incentivize players to troll servermates from a map.
There is a big difference between a global buff (like a weighted tick) and a personal buff (like the outnumbered buff).
As it is right now even something like the existance of a map cap has a much stronger potential to cause trolling than a weighted tick.
It’s already been said by Anet devs that they don’t want a population biased scoring because it could lead to players harassing others on the same team that want to play.
Do you have any link for that statement and how recent was it?
Not sure you understand how math works or that you understand what equal means.
If you want to use really bad analogies like building a house. Lets call the points your pay. You asking players to take less pay for the same real estate.
Sigh, I will put it in very simple words to give you a realistic chance to understand it:
many players = big influence; few players = little influence
this results in each player having the same influence.
Or, if you’re still with me, if you take an arbitrary subset of a given size of all players of a server each of these should have the same potential impact on the servers ranking and not be distorted by some being around when there is little resistance.
Think of it this way.
Your “night” is my “day”, and I live in NA. My Evening starts at 7-8am EST. My points, and time should mean nothing less, and be counted as nothing less, just because “you” have to go to school, sleep, work, whatever.
Few people take longer to build a house than many, the point of a scaled tick is that everyone is able to contribute equally. The point of the rating system is to determine fair and fun matchups, but this is much harder if people that are around during low activity count much more than people who are around during high activity.
Things it could include could be:
Increased magic find%
Increased Health (enough to actually make a difference)
The ability to “Not” count towards PPK
Increased movement speed, or many other buffs.
Anet could even add in where siege is buffed for the player using it so long as they have the “out manned buff” and such “on them”
(List goes on.)
I doubt that they will ever grant actual combat advantages to an outnumbered team.
Is that true for Germans who speak even a little bit of English too? Do they prefer to join international servers instead of a German server?
I just don’t see how any scoring system is going to benefit you here in a 24/7 game mode like WvW. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to want to be able to have an official German server, which only Germans, who predominantly reside in a specific time zone, tend to join. And you also want this server to be able to score competitively in WvW, a mode which currently operates 24 hours a day over an entire week. Don’t you think that seems a bit contradictory? Why design a game mode to be 24/7, but then make it so that a server that only has population online during a small fraction of that time can compete alongside servers that have population at all times of the day?
I have to echo my previous post here. If we’re advocating for a system that weights PPT by the amount of population currently online, then what’s the point in the game mode being 24/7? It seems like an EotM style, 4 hour long match game mode would fit your idea of competitive play much better.
Of course people speaking French, Spanish or German will likely join their national servers, but for anyone else an international server is much more attractive.
It’s not about me wanting to have an official German server, there already are national servers, 5 French, 1 Spanish and 7 German and yes I want my server to be competetive.
I don’t have a problem with WvW being 24/7, but as I said I dislike when the match is decided when hardly anyone is around.
If it’s true that most German speakers live in the CET time zone, then what does it matter if you recruit non-Germans for other time zones? You’re not going to be playing at the same time as them anyway, who cares if they don’t speak German?
When I was on SBI (US), we had a ton of Chinese and Korean players playing in the SEA time zones, many of whom spoke no English. No one cared, because there weren’t many English speakers playing at that time anyway.
When people speak even the tiniest bits of English they will join an international server instead of a German server and most people wouldn’t bother joining a server that has nothing to offer for their time zone to build it up themselves.
Even if a non-German guild would accidentally join they would be hardly able to interact with the rest of the community and thus wouldn’t bond to the server.
There’s a couple problems. 1) It’s still possible for even vastly outnumbered teams to do something useful in WvW (and they can often avoid getting rolled over). You don’t want to make their very presence potentially detrimental by inflating the enemy teams’ scores. And 2) perception is an issue. If a team thinks they’re going to be vastly outnumbered, and that by logging in they may inflate the enemy score, they’re less likely to log in at all, or hang around if they don’t see many teammates on initially. Even if enough people would have eventually logged on to put up a good fight. TL;DR: having any disincentive to play, even if it’s just for a small number of people, is problematic.
Each player will contribute roughly one point to each tick and there are much bigger factors like fun or personal rewards that influences a persons decision to play. We even have a mechanic that is a disincentive to play, whenever you enter WvW you have risk to grant your enemy points if they stomp you and I never heard people complaining that they won’t play because of this.
In fact the far bigger problem is that the current system offers a strong incentive to play when you should sleep/work/go to school, because this is the time when you as an individual could have the most effect and I find this very unhealthy for WvW.
I mean, I don’t know whether it was intended that servers can buy guilds, but it’s not exactly against the rules. And I think my comment applies to recruitment and community-building in general, not just buying guilds.
The problem is that you can organize coverage only to a certain degree and especially EU national servers will have a hard time to cover all time zones no matter how much work you put into it.
The problem is that WvW is not designed around each player having an equal value. The only reason objectives even have walls and gates is so that an outnumbered force has some advantages over a more populated force and can hold them off at least for some time. A 40-person guild may spend all evening holding and defending garrison and upgrading it to T3, only for 5 people with a golem to take it a few hours later after they log off (and no scoring system can change the fact that that will happen). I definitely agree that it’s not fun when you lose everything overnight, but a population weighting system wouldn’t fix that either, it would only prevent enemies from running up the score overnight.
That is actually the point of a competetive system that each player has the opportunity contribute as much as any other player. Scaling the tick may not prevent t3s to fall to a few players but it prevents that the enemy server accumulates a big lead on top of that, so when the guild plays the next evening they see that their server still has a realistic chance to catch up.
It doesn’t have to be linear, but even a linear weighting system is already rather complicated. The current system is simple: the more objectives you own, the most points you accrue. And when it comes from to a scoring system, simplicity is a good thing. I think anything more complicated than a linear weighting system would rule your idea out entirely.
Why would simplicity be a good thing? The more accurately a player can predict the points he will get the more he may attempt to play the system instead of the game. The only thing the player really needs to know about the scaling is that more people means higher total tick, the actual algorithm used for the scaling is completely irrelevant to the player.
Indeed, the system doesn’t make a difference between those two, but that’s supposed to be the benefit of it. It means there’s no benefit to overstacking a time period. It greatly favors time zone coverage, yes, but since this is a 24/7 game mode I think that’s ok. I don’t see how that means that it excludes players from having an influence on the final result, you’d have to elaborate on that one.
My problem is that most people can’t contribute 2/3 of the day due to sleep/work/school and for a majority these 2/3 are the same, so even if they completely dominate during the 1/3 they can contribute they have no influence on the other 2/3 where they might loose the match to a much smaller force.
First, it disincentivizes actually playing the game if you are on a currently-outnumbered team. If you are currently vastly outnumbered by a team that has a very strong “nighttime” presence (I’m well aware it’s not nighttime for everyone, hence the quotes), you know that they are going to accrue a bunch of PPT no matter what. If you still decide to play, even while outnumbered, you will add to the total population in the matchup, and thus give a greater weight/scale to the PPT the strong team accrues. If you want to limit the amount of PPT they gain, you are better off not playing at all so that it is weighted less. That way your server has an easier time making up the difference during its “primetime”.
This incentive might be there, but only during times where one or two server clearly dominates the other, which are times with low population so the incentive is minimal and no bigger factor than players stopping from frustation by being rolled over.
If you want to further reduce this incentive you can add an offset of 10% – 20% even if no one is around.
Second, WvW is not designed to be fair or have balanced populations all the time. Yes, your team’s strategic, tactical, and straight combat skill should be a factor in how highly you score. But success in WvW is also frankly a matter of effort, recruitment, and keeping up morale. Those WvW communities which do the best job at convincing their players to show up night after night (day after day) and play should be rewarded. Those communities which are more highly organized and manage to recruit populations during all time slots should be rewarded. This is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week match; an ultramarathon, not a sprint. Weighting the PPT score based on current population completely negates this second aspect of success in WvW, rendering community efforts to recruit players from various time slots and to increase player turnout during a given time slot useless.
While I think that the strategic element is important as far as motivation, training and recruiting (means activating the potential of the own server) is concerned, I doubt that it ever was intended that servers buy guilds from other servers to improve their coverage.
Having the point of view of a German server there are hardly any German-speaking guilds outside of CET-time zone.
Third, a team’s time in WvW should not be more or less valuable to the score than another team’s just because they play at different timezones. A weighting system would mean teams that play “at night” are inherently less valuable to a matchup than those that play during “primetime” since they contribute less total PPT to the score for the same amount of time played. This has a significant negative effect on morale and just overall fun. As a competitive player, you want to feel that your time played is valuable to your team. With a weighting system, the value you add during your playtime is now largely out of your control, since it is dictated by the number of other players playing.
I don’t see an issue there since each servers tick has the same weight. It’s the point of the scaling system that each player is valued equally.
The thing I see having a negative effect on morale and overall fun right now is doing well on an evening and see all of it gone when you get back from work the next day.
Ironically, it’s this third point where the current scoring system also fails. Unlike a population weighting system for PPT, where teams playing “at night” contribute less to the score than teams playing “at primetime”, the current system has the opposite problem. Right now, it’s possible for teams playing “at night” to rack up an outsized portion of their team’s total weekly score. This means that, effectively, teams playing during “primetime” contribute less to the total weekly score than teams playing “at night”; that their playtime has less value score-wise. And this has an effect on morale that we’ve all seen; everyone asking “why do you even care about PPT?” is basically echoing this sentiment, that the scoring system feels meaningless or that they don’t feel they make a valuable contribution to the score anyway, so why fuss over it.
Actually a weighting system doesn’t have to be linear, if the current system leans to far to one side and a linear system to far to the other there must be a feasible function in between. For the sake of simplicity I argue for a linear system but if you want to discuss math I’m up for it.
The solution is not a population weighting system, which has the unique problems I identified in points one and two above, and in the case of point three (which it shares with the current scoring system) simply transfers the problem from one timezone to another. A proper solution is to find a way to value a team’s contributions in all timezones equally, while avoiding any unintended consequences.
The best solution I’ve seen that values playtime in all time zones equally is the some variation of the scoring periods idea, where a match is split up into several scoring periods per day, and winning the match is a matter of winning the most scoring periods. Because the PPT score is reset between scoring periods, winning the match cannot be accomplished just by having a highly populated team in any single scoring period. In the CDI thread about scoring changes we had almost a year ago, this was largely the consensus solution that seemed the most fair while retaining the best “unfair” aspects of WvW. I gave a detailed example of one variation of such a system here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Scoring-Discussion/page/4#post4474765
That said, there may be other solutions. But no matter what, if you’re going to continue to advocate for a population weighting solution, you need to address the three points I made above, because they are serious potential flaws.
The first thing I noticed with your system is that it’s completely incompatible with the current rating system, the second issue I see is that it doesn’t make a difference between let’s say 3800/3710/3610 and 10000/570/550. Your system greatly favours coverage and thus works even more than the current system towards excluding most of the players of a server to have an influence on the final result.
That is not their fault. That is the defending servers fault. Nor does a tower need to be “heavily” defended. As well, those who cannot play when their server needs defending are not punished. Because the rule set does not change in a way that targets them. The suggestion you are supporting changes the rules to specifically segregate and punish others for the playing the game, simply because it isn’t the same time you play. Unless you offer a solution that does not biasly segregate others, your are going to not only push players out of the game, but you will get heavy pushback. Perhaps instead of arguing this terrible idea, it would be best served to focus that effort on finding a good idea.
That’s like saying that banning cars from a marathon is punishing carowners when it’s the contrary, it puts everyone on equal footing.
I wouldn’t even care for points at all, but they determine our matchups and as it is now a very small group of players can make a disproportional amount of points resulting in matchups where one server dominates during a certain time, but can’t rise appropriately because another server can make just as many points with a much smaller force at another time, which results in matches that are extremely one-sided most of the time and no fun at all.
That is a suggestion, it is by no means a solution. It will do little more then drive players away from the game who cannot play on each servers peak hours. By demonstrating their efforts are worth lesser of a point value, and thus punishing them for it.
Their efforts may be worth less than they are now, but the entire point of tick scaling is to make sure that every indivudual can have the same impact and those who can raze t3s while nobody else is around still are a great advantage for a server, because they don’t have to take these t3s while it’s heavily defended.
As it is now people who can’t play when their server needs more coverage are punished.
Part of the issue is that you seem to be unaware of what the entire problem is. You specifies “tiers” for example. Well if tiers had similar player distribution over similar times, the off time point accumulation wouldn’t be an issue now would it? the tiers themselves are irrelevant. The player participation imbalance throughout various time frames are what the complaint seems to be here. That is not a tier to tier issue, because if it was equal across a tier, their would be no complaint. It happens between servers within a tier.
From an EU point of view you can’t have similar player distribution over similar times due to the structural difference of national and international servers.
Indeed. That is part of the problem as I see it. Some posters seem to make the inaccurate assuption that what they see in their tier is what happens to everyone. There are what, 70 servers after the China release? So why posters think thier experience with 3, 6, or even 9 servers, come close to representing all servers, is beyond me.
It doesn’t really matter that it’s only a problem in some tiers and not in all. The solution that was suggested to scale the tick based on active population means that the points are in relation to the amount of players that participate, so if your tier has coverage for all time zones it will hardly influence you, while solving a big problem for other tiers.
Like most of the abilities in the game, there are different coefficients for their “main stat”
Most damage abilities have power as a main stat, with different coefficients per skill. Healing skills have different coefficients per skill as well.
The difference is that power scales proportional meaning you get double damage for the the first 1000 power you put on top of your base power.
With conditions you get a damage increase of 125% to up to 300% for the first 1000 points of condition damage.
For healingpower it has the most variation down to the point where it’s simply not worth to use it at all, which is the case for the druid for example.
A shout/banner warrior actually gets something from healing power, you can double those heals by getting 1000 healing power.
Though there are other heals that only see a 15 – 20% boost from 1000 healing power.
Scaling score based on total active population is not only a bad design, but also an unfair.
It’s bad because coverage is not a stale thing, it always fluctuates and it only benefits those servers with more coverage and taxes those with less, since as more coverage you have, more determinant is your server activity to the equation and this system is only benefiting your prime time.
Scaling the tick this way does the exact opposite, it gives those times more weight that have more people around and I don’t see how you come up with any different conclusion so I give a simple example.
All 3 servers filled all WvW maps and those are (for this example) 600 players so the tick is counted at 100%. At an other time there are only 60 players around so the the tick is counted only at 10%, this way it doesn’t matter this much even if it is something like 40 vs 10 vs 10.
It is not night capping because one server has 30 on a map while the other only has 10 to 15. that is pure night laziness on your servers part. Yet you attempt to apply a term and stigma to the more active server. No one night caps anything by simply playing on their terms. The fault lays with the night slackers not doing anything to stop it.
Yeah those lazy bummers who rather want to catch some sleep before work and after they wasted 8 hours sleeping it gets even worse, they actually go to work instead of taking the day off to save their tick.
In this thread I keep hearing that servers can or should do something, but the catch is servers can’t do anything, players can and for most players it’s simply not an option to stay up all night to play WvW.
You forget that in some servers the night population is a big part of the total active population, and there’s more people playing at nights than what you might think.
Well that would be only Baruch as far as EU is concerned, but I didn’t say that you are not allowed to gain points at night, I just think it would be far healthier for WvW if this was scaled by the currently active WvW-population. (for all times actually if this was your concern)
Focusing the ppt problem only during nights is not a good way. This is a 24h competition and all hours should matter the same. If you plan to address the ppt issues from large coverage disparities, it needs to be done across all day.
Also, not having coverage at a big part of the day such the night only shows the server doesn’t have the coverage as it seems.Because we always need to have in mind this is a 24h competition.
My server is the exact opposite of yours, I’m on a German server and the overwhelming majority lives in one time zone, with the result that most people are unable to contribute 2/3 of the day due to sleep and work/school.
There is no such thing as nightcapping. Ones night is someone else’s day.
Yes, it is frustrating. But at the same time, wouldn’t it be just as frustrating for the people playing during your night when their work is nullified during their night?
It’s rather a few hundred peoples night is the day of a few others. The point is not that off-time shouldn’t contribute at all, but in proportion to active population, as it is right now the majority of the population has very little influence on the final result.
It seems a bit wasteful to me to actually calculate a path from starting point to target. Wouldn’t it be much simpler to tag areas in a way that those which are connected receive the same tag, this way you only have to check whether the area you start from has the same tag as the target area. It even would be possible to include areas that can’t be reached by a path for convenience (e.g. a rock with steep sides) or add conditions (e.g. porting down a cliff but not up or porting into a tower if it is open or your side owns it)
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