Showing Posts For SixFPCs.9840:
Let me know your thoughts and thanks again for all the great and constructive discussion!
John
John, I think that the implementation of alliances on a large scale would severely reduce community building in WvW as a result of chilling effects on how guilds interact overall. Since server communities are one of the primary draws for WvW players, I think alliances are a poor idea.
Servers bring together a wide range of guilds. The large WvW-focused guilds team up with small havoc squads from PvX guilds and individual players. We all get together and talk and plan, because we are fighting as a server. We are all fighting together for some indeterminate amount of time (in technical terms, this is an infinite length cooperative game unless other conditions are imposed). As a result, we learn to work together and communicate, despite having different interests and priorities and strengths.
Once alliances are introduced, the threat of being moved to another server on any given week, or being reorganized entirely if we change the system more drastically, means that I have much less reason to invest in building a relationship with a non-alliance guild. If you are outside the alliance, I have to be afraid of the fact that I might not be on your team again for a long time. Thus, there is less relationship-building, because relationships are perceived as more transient. This creates a chilling effect where I am less likely to befriend a non-alliance guild, unless I intend to recruit them into my alliance. They are simply outside of the effective “server”.
To take an extreme example, compare alliances to sPvP hotjoin. I don’t really care much about learning to work as a team with these particular players (despite the fact that it will help me win), because these guys likely won’t be on my team again. In fact, it’s possible for them to get shunted over to the other side to balance out the teams during that same game. There is no reason to build an effective team, or even any kind of connection with them, because there is no future benefit. Alliances will shift WvW play in this direction.
Certainly a lot of good people will still help to build communities, and perhaps large alliances will result and replace the server identity. But on the whole, the sense of community will be lowered as a result of alliances, and as such I can offer no support to the idea of alliances as you currently describe it.
In the spirit of brainstorming further, I’d like to add an idea—a potentially controversial one.
I suggest that ANet reduce transfer costs, with proper controls against abuse. Monitor trends to determine player wants and needs, and only then close down or merge servers.
I would like to note that, in discussing this idea, I am pointedly ignoring the issue of coverage (as requested).
Background:
WvW means different things to all of us. Some play for the big open-field fights, some play for PPT, some like GvG. Some prefer constant high pop and fights everywhere, some (only a few?) prefer low pop matchups. We all want to do what we enjoy.
Merging servers or capping population or setting up battle groups will push WvW in a specific direction, and several sets of people will be unhappy. The primary issue that these things would address is the currently global lack of WvW players, but they would do so by forcibly removing some players from their current environment, an environment in which they might already be very happy.
WvW has always been a sandbox kind of PvP environment, in the sense that there is very little outside intervention. (This lack of intervention is so extreme that reports of hacking and trolling have gone unaddressed for a long period of time.) As a result, players have learned to find their own solutions as best they can, including full guild transfers when necessary. Thus, out of necessity, WvW communities have become very astute at determining the best way to solve their own problems.
The constant movement of players into T1 servers represents the popularity of the high population WvW dynamic. The inability of many to enter their desired servers indicates that we do not have enough high pop servers. Conversely, the disappointment of many players with their WvW ghost towns suggests that low pop servers are in excess. Since we cannot artificially increase total WvW player population (or, it is outside the scope of the current discussion), we must close servers.
Discussion:
In the short term, a reduction in transfer costs will lower the barrier for WvW-focused players to find the right type of WvW environment for each individual or guild, and allow players a level of control and decision-making in the closure of servers that ensures they find the fight destination server. By making this reduction global, we allow the entire WvW community to readjust as necessary. However, the conservative approach would be to reduce transfer costs only for players on the servers targeted for closure, or those below a certain population threshold.
In the longer term, a reduction in transfer costs will help alleviate problems caused by WvW population imbalance by enabling players to more easily seek and locate the server on which they can best enjoy WvW, without requiring constant or periodic developer monitoring (think of the resources that are consumed in one run of server rebalance! it isn’t sustainable).
There are serious problems associated with reducing transfer costs, primarily in terms of competitive WvW play, but I believe these are by and large mitigated by proper implementation. At the most basic level, transfers should have a cooldown, perhaps a month or longer, and they should be immediately and completely disabled upon the official announcement of WvW tournament dates—this will protect against common and obvious attempts to exploit the system. In addition, transfers could also carry a cost that directly impacts competitive and reward-focused players, who are the most prone to abuse. For example, in a weekly reward format (what we currently have), rewards could be locked to the originating server’s performance for the week during which the transfer occurred, or even for the duration of the tournament, and this could be accomplished simply by having the game check (and store in memory) each player’s home server at week’s start, instead of at achievement completion.
In addition, it is likely only a minority of players that would abandon their server for tickets, as that action should seem cowardly and craven to any player with a modicum of principle. It should also be noted that, in general, these types of abuse would not impact the aforementioned benefits of the system.
Summary:
A reduction in transfer costs will allow players to more easily find a WvW environment that they enjoy. In addition, it will enable us to get a more accurate view of exactly which servers need to be closed or merged, and thus should occur prior to any server restructuring. Reducing transfer costs enables players to maximize their enjoyment, while minimizing developer/staff resources consumed, and also providing sorely needed data on server status and players’ desires.
While this kind of reduction would invite abuse, especially in terms of WvW tournament rewards, the potential for abuse can be mitigated in a variety of ways, including simpler limits on transfers and rewards.
After today’s patch (Sept 12), I saw this post:
I received that same error when GW2 crashed while playing. GW2 still running in the activity monitor so I did a reboot of the computer and I was able to launch it.
(from this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/mac/Problems-After-Patch/)
Tried restarting, and that fixed the issue for me. If you are seeing error -1712 from the Finder, restart before you try the workaround I posted.
Thanks Supercluster for the solution.
Hello all,
I quickly browsed some of the topics and did not see this addressed. Forgive me if this is redundant.
Background: after the hot fix patch today (Sept 10th), my launcher froze and will not start at all. This despite working fine after the Sept 9th patch. Now, when I try to open GW2, the Finder says that GW2 cannot be opened, and has an error code of -1712.
I have a MBPr (mid 2012) and I am running OS X 10.8.5 (and thus the mac beta client).
I found a weird but simple workaround (to at least log in and zone in):
Right-click or control-click on the Guild Wars 2 application.
Choose the second option, “Show Package Contents”.
Open the only visible folder, “Contents”.
Open the folder “MacOS”
Double-click the only item, “cider”. This shows up as a Unix Executable File for me, I cannot tell what the real extension or file type is.
Terminal will open up*. Let it run until the launcher opens up.
Log in as normal.
*Note that terminal will continue to stay open. If you try to close it before exiting GW2, it will tell you that the process “cider” will be stopped. I have not been able to test this extensively, but quitting at any point after the launcher fully loads has not caused any problems for me.
I have not tested the gem store or trading post, simply the ability to log in.
I hope this helps for both players and developers. If you get the chance, please report your game functionality (gem store, TP, chat, etc.) after using this method to log in, as I will not have time to continue testing this week.
If anyone with even a slight amount of coding knowledge wants to investigate, the terminal returns the following error several times after starting cider:
“cider[12761:707] Can’t open input server /Library/InputManagers/Smart Crash Reports.bundle”