Guild Wars 2

In a hurry? Read the TL;DR down below.

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I tried opening a support ticket for this question and was deflected directed here.

I’m curious about a scoring dynamic I believe to be at work in WvW. Forgive me if I cover the basics, but I’m building an argument here from first principles.

• World vs World maps have per-world player limits. ANet doesn’t release what these limits are, or even if they are static or if they adjust to some set of variables, but there’s definitely an upper limit to how many people each world can have in a map concurrently. ANet has stated that the limit is always the same for all three worlds.
• Match ups between 3 worlds occur for a set length of time. Right now that’s a week long period.
• I want to define a “player-hour” as a single player actively participating in a WvW map for 60 mins. If I play for an hour in EBG, then that’s 1 player-hour. If my guild-mate and I both play for the same hour, that’s 2 player-hours. If she plays for an hour, signs off, and then I sign on and play for an hour, that’s still 2 player hours.
• Combining these three ideas means there is a hard upper limit on the number of player-hours that each world can bring to bear during a single week-long match up. Using an admittedly crude guess of 168 hours in a week and 750 players in WvW per world concurrently (5 maps x 150 players each), that estimated number of maximum participation is 126,000 player-hours. No world can participate more than this due to the combination of the time limit and per-map player count limit.
• That said, the actual numbers don’t make a difference here. The principle that there is a “maximum per-world participation limit” in WvW is probably accurate unless ANet decides to share something we don’t know about.

My theory is that there is a strong correlation between the worlds that achieve a higher war score and those that have a higher WvW player-hours. In other words: Regardless of other skill factors, a world where there is always a queue to enter WvW (meaning they have the max number of players in WvW) will have an overwhelming advantage over one that does not have full participation. I think this is the largest determining factor in being able to take and hold WvW match objectives that count for points. Surely at the top of the spectrum (TC, JQ, BG) where I suspect all three worlds remain at maximum participation the majority of the time the match is legitimately about individual and team skill, but I can’t help but wonder if Kaineng and Eredon are at the bottom just because hardly anybody there plays WvW.

Don’t get me wrong, a big part of winning a war is who can muster a larger fighting force and it’s fair (to a degree) for that to be represented in the scores, but I would like to also see normalized scores in the form of (total_world_score / world_player_hours_logged). Normalizing for the hours would give you an idea of a world’s actual skill by calculating it as a ratio per player-hour. It allows us to look at a match and say, “On average Crystal Desert earned 165 points for each player-hour, but they still lost because even though Isle of Janthir only earned 120 points per player-hour, IOJ logged twice as many player-hours for the week overall.”

Again, I happily concede that at the top end of the ladder where WvW participation is probably very high and the maps are always or nearly always 100% full for every world, you get to see true competition on “equal” footing where skill and strategy actually come into play because the fighting forces are roughly equal all the time. For the rest of the worlds though, I suspect determining who is winning at any given time can be done by asking, “who has more bodies in the map?” And predicting the winner of the match is mainly a matter of figuring out who will have more bodies in WvW most of the week.

I’m not interested in changing how the score is calculated, but if I’m right then I think it’s fair to let players know that if they want their world to win, they need to focus on recruiting, scheduling/spelling their WvW efforts and getting people to just plain “show up”. How good each individual player is probably isn’t all that important until your world can pack WvW all week long.

I’m requesting that ANet publish total player hours for each world’s weekly match up (if they have it) or to start tracking and publishing it along with war score if they do not.

Please upvote this post if you agree at all that this information would be valuable to players.