Guild Wars 2

kanikani.2430:

Actually I dont want instanced or cross server battlegrounds. What I would like is to see larger servers an insentives to transfer down and smaller servers consolidated. I would love if the servers kept their own feel and personality that will not be achieve in cross server battlegrounds. And I want to see more variety in matches it is really boring as the OP put it. And I do not want the size to shrink to 50 at all, it was a arbitrary number in my post before.

I want the game to stay exactly like it is, just with more people on each server so it is a game of skill vs a game of numbers. And I would like some variety in who I play against. As well as variety of maps/rewards and so on. I am not alone in this.

What is your solution to not having tiers stick this way forever? What will make people not get “Tired of Fighting the Same Servers”?

Neither of DivineBeing solutions or Oreo solutions are decent because it basically takes the same thing but adds a one or two servers more as opponents (from higher or lower tiers). That is not enough for variety long term (say years). So instead of playing 2 or 3 opponents forever, I get 4 or 5. Wow big variety, that is a game changer.

yeah, well that’s not a problem with the way wvw works its a problem with anet management, there just arent enough people playing and free transfer means people who are sick of their server just switch to a winning server instead of trying harder to make their losing server win. And really there aren’t enough highly active servers to really have much more rotation than that without making it even worse for many dying servers. Sucks :/

It wont be 165v165v165 if you make it 50v50v50, which is what I was referring to. What I was explaining is that even if you make it 50v50v50, one of those 50 will dominate the others because their 50, will be better because some servers just have a highly dedicated player base for WvW that will be simply better, and I was pointing to WoW because 40v40 isnt so far from 50v50v50, and 40v40 even with random people wasnt balanced, not even close because they do not draw their people from the same player pool, some severs have a very dedicated hardcore pvper base while some don’t.

And again, may be fun if you are a middle of the road server, but the weaker servers will suffer from this.

The only way to fix the system, is to fix the system ! removing it won’t actually fix anything, because that system was put in place to prevent other problems that will come back to bite you.

And really what you want is a 50v50v50 instanced cross-server battleground ppl queue up for… what I say is, great, but that’s not WvW, thats a wow battleground.

As for you reply to divine, divine is right, what you propose as a solution is to remove rankings, the pop cap is just a fix of the problem caused by your solution, which is that we need something to ensure people get fair games. What I argue here with proof from other games is that even with even numbers, servers with a bigger hardcore pvp communauty will still dominate and the balance issue caused from removing the ranking system will not be fixed by changing the player cap. And again, ranking isn’t about the middle of the road server, it’s about the top/bottom servers so they can get good matchups.

This is basically a whole overhaul for a problem that could be fixed simply by a small tweak to the rating system so it actually promotes movement across tiers.

kanikani.2430:

@Oreo

Yes but when we are talking about large numbers like GW2 you will get groups of noobs and groups of hardcores on all servers. So yes if you grabbed 50 people in lions arch some will be great some will not be so.

50 v 50 would be much better then the current system of 5 v 50 or do you think that it is working well now? At this point teamwork, strategy, skill, have very little to do with how WvW is played, I would love to see that be so. And the player cap is only needed for the first couple tiers otherwise most servers never see it (yes there is a world outside tier 1).

The thing you dont and a few other seem to get is if you fix population, you no longer need tiers. You can jumble up matches all the time. The only way to change tier stagnation is to have more servers be on equal grounds, I think that is done by population fixing. Did you read my whole post about removing tiers and random matches?

And if one server gets creamed by some fantastic guild on one server it randomly changes next week, not the end of the world. But I have played WvW since beta, and I have seen great things from ALL servers. Great ideas, great skill, to think that T1 has a monopoly on that is just silly. If some of the T8 servers had the kind of populations of T1 they would be up there just the same. And if the T1 servers lost numbers they would fall quickly.

Well I don’t think that’s exactly the point of the thread, what I say is that changes to how many people play doesn’t fix the ranking system. What you are talking about is removing the ranking system, and I do not believe it would work. The reason I say this is because the whole point of the ranking is so that people don’t get bored kitten too much , and the reality is that the worst/best servers will be the losers in this, yes you, on your middle of the road server may get an more balanced game next week, but what about the best/worst servers, they will go from boring game into more boring game where they are either unchallenged or utterly destroyed. Also I do not believe the fact that it is 50 actually changes anything. Have you played WoW ? There is a battleground called alteract valley it’s 40vs40, and even in PUGs, with 40 random guys vs 40 random guys, the reality is, its 24/7 of one side farming the other, just because of the superior player pool, and it’s not fun.

As for playing on WvW of other servers, than that wouldn’t be much of a WvW anymore, thats would be just wow style battlegrounds, which is nice, but on its own, not really as a replacement.

kanikani.2430:

Oreo.1503:

I don’t think rebalancing population would work, the obvious reason is that if for example all tier 8 servers suddenly became overpopulated at the same time, they still wouldn’t move up, because they would only be rated in relation to each other and not to the others, and adding population and than removing tiers would just result in wvw oriented servers destroying pve oriented servers who would never get to enjoy wvw, which is the situation we want to avoid with a ranking system.

I don’t think you understand what balancing the population means. It would mean at a given time you would have 50 on each server fighting each other (or whatever numbers). And the ranking system promotes stagnation and should be removed as a whole, except for bragging rights purposes. At least as far as match ups are concerned. If every server had similar populations at similar times the fights would be relatively equal across all severs.

Isn’t that what we all want, relatively equal and fun fights that vary from time to time to keep us from getting bored? If numbers = win, then if we all have the same numbers then what? Skill = win? Isn’t that what we want?

Imagine playing chess where one side starts with 5 pieces and the other starts with 50. Isn’t that kind of dumb?

1st, there is already a cap, I’m on a tier 1 server and I get queued. And YOU don’t get it, fixing population DOESN’T address the issue of tier movement and DOESN’T make every server “equal”. The WvW servers will still crush the unorganised PvE servers, which is what rankings are there for.

Any relative ranking system will fall apart if you have insulated groups that only ever play people amongst their given group. The result is that each sever in a given tier is very accurately ranked is relation to the other servers of the same tier but tiers are not accurately ranked in relation to each other.

This means that there has to be a mechanic put in place to artificially increase movement amongst tiers to make sure the tier ranking remains accurate.

It is important to note that WvW is designed to give an advantage to a losing server, and makes it hard for a winning server to achieve complete dominance(winner has more land to cover, more likely to get 2v1ed, the new shielded catapult crap, etc), this too is a problem as it tends to keep scores closer, thus making it harder to win/lose by large margins thus reducing potential rating changes.

The best way to fix this in my opinion is simply to give a value to W/L, to only compare scores promotes stagnancy as WvW in itself is built to promote close win margins. You can easily see this when a server that just increased in tier suddenly win rating even if losing, because it “didn’t lose by enough”, which is not a by-product of their skill but of the way WvW is designed.

Edit: I don’t think rebalancing population would work, the obvious reason is that if for example all tier 8 servers suddenly became overpopulated at the same time, they still wouldn’t move up, because they would only be rated in relation to each other and not to the others, and adding population and than removing tiers would just result in wvw oriented servers destroying pve oriented servers who would never get to enjoy wvw, which is the situation we want to avoid with a ranking system.