Guild Wars 2

2 days and pushed to page 13 already.

I tried posting this same issue in-game using `/bug` but the dropdowns to select what area of the game the report affects don’t list the launcher program anywhere. Why are there these gaping holes in your ability to get feedback from players?

How are these issues supposed to get any attention in the forum when they get bumped off the front page in less than a few hours?

Also, a 45 char limit on form post titles is insane. I’m all for encouraging brevity and clarity, but that’s pushing it. Even twitter gives you more to work with.

Steps to repeat:

• (For the purposes of this report, assume the launcher option for “Remember Account Name” is checked, the “Remember Password” option is UNchecked and you have successfully logged in to your account before.)
• Launch Guild Wars 2.
• (You will be presented with the login/download launcher.)
• (Your email address will already be filled in, and your text cursor will be active in the Password field.)
• Enter an incorrect password.
• Press Enter or click “Log In”.
• (As expected, you will be presented with the dark error screen saying, “The account name or password you entered is invalid. Please try again.”)
• Press Enter or click “Okay” to return to the Login screen.
• The Password field has been blanked out, but the “Password” field no longer has input focus!

This is just inconsistent UI construction. The UI should honor the text input cursor placement before the error was encountered and return focus to the Password field (which is where it was before the error was encountered.)

If I’m being honest, I think there actually may be a reason Anet wouldn’t want to publish this. Being able to see when your opponents are at their weakest (in terms of participating players) could be exploited. Although, probably not significantly more so than first-hand in-game experience of not seeing any enemies anywhere.

The single best thing you can do to get higher FPS is to reduce the amount of work the GPU needs to perform for each screen “update.” In short: use a lower resolution. If your Mac’s native screen resolution is 1440×900, try 1280×800 for example. That’s a massively smaller number of pixels to worry about with each redraw and you should see the best improvement with this single setting change.

Of course, this will make the game look pretty blurry/awful, but you have no choice if your goal is purely FPS.

The Mac client isn’t technically “native”, it is using a product from Transgaming called Cider, which just wraps up the Windows executable and data files and translates the operating system calls to work with OS X. (Right-click on Guild Wars 2.app and choose “Show Package Contents”, then browse into Contents > Resources > transgaming > c_drive.)

That’s probably part of the reason for the permanent “beta” tag: Anet can’t necessarily 100% control how the Windows client works through that translation layer. And regardless, keeping the Mac client permanently in beta relieves them of any responsibility if it doesn’t work correctly, in spite of any assistance they choose to offer here.

It would be great for the Mac to be treated as a first-class citizen, but no game built around DirectX can ever be such a thing. We’ll always be relegated to platitudes like, “it should work, but we don’t guarantee it.” The bottom line is that there’s no good reason for them to ever make the Mac client “official.” We should however be extremely grateful that they bothered producing and releasing it for us at all though.

mango.9267:

OP, your language suggests that you think there’s a direct (and strong) causal relationship between player-hours and score. Even if Anet did publish player-hours, at best, you can establish statistical significance, but you still won’t be able to measure the causal relation.

Of course not, but can you think of a better “next” metric to make available? All (or much) of the bookkeeping is in place already to track this proposed addition. And while I could link to literally hundreds of posts in these forums railing over how war score and PPT alone don’t imply skill (just participation!), at least with the addition of how much effort is being expended to earn it we’d be able to make that relationship explicit instead of simply entertaining lively, repeated (and largely pointless) discourse about it right here in these very threads. We could make things constructive by moving to discussion about what strategy, training and tactics has a measurable effect on the ratio of score to effort expended. My proposal is exactly about helping servers become better at WvW at the macro level.

mango.9267:

That’s just a more technical way of saying correlation doesn’t imply causation. What contributes to the number of player-hours logged is much more important than player-hours themselves: skill, organization, morale, etc.

Yes, certainly. I don’t disagree with that at all. But by the same token I could ask you to provide “proof” that your claims about skill organization and morale actually matter. My point is; both of our arguments continue to be entirely rhetorical without actual data. We’re sitting here saying, “WvW is this or that,” without any data other than a single war score to support it, all of us. What I’ve tried to do here is provide a specific theory (“war score is strongly correlated with participation”) (something we all seem to suspect or believe already anyway) and a way to measure it (“divide war score by the number of hours logged by all players in WvW for the match.”)

mango.9267:

At best, your normalized metric tells you how efficient a server is at PPT (though, it probably doesn’t even do that). Let’s not pretend it’ll say much about a server’s skill or organization.

Yes, exactly! But its seems like you’re reversing my intent. This is not intended to score a server’s skill (well, not any more than war score already does, in any case) as much as act as a catalyst for it. No, I want something that can be used at the social level.

This isn’t altruistic by any means. I’m loyal to my fake digital “world” and I’d like to see us play better. Personally I get frustrated watching easily defended towers fall because nobody was around to man a single arrow cart. What I’m personally trying to get out of this is a single number I can point to and say, “Look, if we’re serious about this, we need a shift of volunteers on watch these hours of the day where our participation normally tanks.”

We can measure the effect that specific change in our behavior has with this number! Crudely of course, since as you say, skill and organization and other things may contribute, but what if they don’t? What is different commanders on the same day in the same time slot with “the same” amount of player participation produce a PPT that is statistically “the same”? What if I’m right and those variances end up NOT being statistically significant in the resulting efficiency ratio? (I think this might be why ANet will never provide what I’m asking for— because it might reveal that WvW is really a complete joke as an actual game mechanic. Note that I’m not saying it’s a joke, but the data might.)

But regardless, from that social perspective the value of feedback is measurably profound. The amount, quality, frequency, nature and characteristics of the available information has a direct impact on people’s choices and performance. Providing more transparency into the supposition that, “if your world wants to win and WvW, you need to make this (as yet theoretical) ratio go higher,” seems to me to be a valuable thing to at least test, don’t you agree?

Right now with war score our only available bit of feedback, when we ask questions like, “Do we just need more people? Or do our people suck and they need more experience?” we can’t really use anything other than anecdotal battlefield experience as a guide, which obviously differs for everyone. We may not be able to answer very (m)any more questions definitively, but some of them will become more measurable with this. We can control for the “how many people?” part of the equation. If you read only a couple of forum posts here, that seems to be a huge part of WvW so I can’t help but think this is a particularly worthy candidate to be considering.

I’m not saying this is the end-all, be-all of improving WvW, but it seems like an easy first step, no?

Drasque Dragonscale.5714:

I think emphasizing the points in your TL;DR, beporter, is more important than trying to control for all the variables. I say, let’s try to get our foot in the door before we get the door slammed in our face.

Agreed. Any additional information along these lines, however imperfect, would be a huge step forward.

There are so many conversations in this forum about how everything is coverage, coverage, coverage. I don’t disagree with that, but I would sure like to see how important a role it plays!

Weird, the thread is completely blank.

I wanted to loop back around to a thought about AFK vs “idle” in the context of WvW and how it relates to this thread. AFK meaning the person is not even present at the computer or isn’t interacting with the GW2 game at all, and idle meaning they are “playing” GW2 but aren’t working towards objectives and world score.

First, I don’t think AFK is anything to worry about given the short timeout in WvW before you get kicked, but I think we can address it regardless. Specifically: There’s been discussion about how tracking player time would also capture both the AFK players and the “idle” players who are crafting or selling off or pretty much doing anything other than being out in the world helping capture and defend targets.

So as we’ve mentioned before, the game is already constantly tracking each of us for when our last input (keyboard or mouse) occurred in WvW and starting a countdown timer to kick us when too much afk time has elapse. So if we were really concerned about those stray minutes (where a player went AFK and eventually got kicked for it) getting added to a world’s time tally, the game could at least subtract the idle timeout when the player is kicked. That’s make it a bit more accurate on that front.

I still think that it is important to know about the people that are logging time in WvW but not contributing to the score, such as those crafting, hitting JPs or going for map completion. That’s a legitimate component to a world’s overall efficiency. With the exception of the jumping puzzles and world completion, if the world want to become more efficient, they need to encourage their non-combatants to leave WvW and conduct their business in LA or PvE in general.

I think the low timeout on the kick for being idle is effective enough at countering most AFK.

Plus as has been mentioned before, the players working on personal objectives (other than WvW points) are only hurting your world if they are keeping people who want to actually play WvW from getting into the map. I play on a Silver Tier server, and never once have I see a queue for any of our WvW maps.

It may be annoying to see people not pulling their weight, but I don’t think they’re actually hurting much score wise, they’re just dead weight.

I tried adding a TL;DR to the original post to save people some time, but it keeps rejecting it. Here it is:

TL;DR:

• ANet should publish an additional value along with WvW points for each world during each match.
• This value is the sum of all player WvW “time” for each world across all WvW maps.
• This does not need to change how scores are actually calculated.

This single additional value would give us feedback about overall participation, peaks/lulls in coverage over the week, how active/idle a world is in their war efforts and most importantly: A ratio of how efficient a world is at earning their WvW score.

Example:

• At the start of the match, all servers start with a time count of zero, just like score.
• Server A has 100 players in WvW for a full 15 minute tick, so they log +1500 “minutes”, and happen to score 500 points in the process.
• Server B has 2 players for the full 15 minutes, and 1 more player that joined late and only added 5 minutes, so they log 15 + 15 + 5 = +35 minutes, and happen to score 35 points.
• Server A’s ratio is 500 points / 1500 mins = 0.33. Server B’s ratio is 35 points / 35 minutes = 1.0. Relatively speaking, Server B is using their manpower more effectively than Server A, but they’re still losing on score (by a lot). The new “time” number tells us this is because they just don’t have enough people playing.
• The “minutes” (or hours or whatever) are cumulative, just like score, and could be published at least via the API and ideally in-game as well.

Additional Notes:

• The game already tracks your logged-in time via the /age command.
• It already tracks whether you are in a WvW map because the game knows to kick you for being idle sooner.
• The data capturing is (obviously) in place in the game engine to track cumulative world score during a match.
• On the surface, these three bits of the engine seem like the majority of the tools needed to record player WvW time alongside world score.
• I would love to get a dev to weigh in on this idea (doesn’t everybody want that for their thread?)

Please upvote the original post if you agree that this information would be valuable to players.

—

I want to read it all! Take me back to the top!

Ayrilana.1396:

Thank you for see where I was coming from and keeping all of this civil.

On that I definitely agree!

I’m sorry Ayrilana, but it’s pretty clear that neither of us are going to manage to convince the other to see things from our own perspective, and that we’re both pretty confident the other person is missing “the big point.”

I’m afraid I don’t see any value in continuing to try to persuade you. Thanks again for your contributions though.

I agree with maloki that it’s always frustrating to see it. But I’d like to offer a small positive spin on it: The way I look at it is that you’re getting “secret” information the other teams don’t know. You know you are outnumbered, but they don’t.

I will use any information the game gives me in order to adjust my team’s play style appropriately and even though it’s not the best news when that buff pops up, at least it’s news you can act on. Information is power.

Ayrilana.1396:

beporter.9254:

You could definitely also publish a raw “player count” (I wouldn’t complain) but on its own that metric is disappointingly useless because there’s no good way to count how many players participated “in a tick” in the first place and any way you counted it would be completely inaccurate without measuring the amount of effort those players exerted in that 15 minute window in the second.

How would you measure effort though as a lot of people could join and just afk? Effort cannot be measured unless you tally it up by objective and once again that would have to be based on player count. It’d be how many people got credit for that objective. There are also other things that people do to benefit the server that you can’t quantify their effort.

Ah, but you see, this is exactly what we need to know. Eri actually explains this extremely well in their follow-up post already, but I can’t resist expounding a bit on a more theoretical level:

The score already tracks objectives captured, kills, etc. The condition we can’t track is if a server is racking up serious WvW player time, but(!) their score isn’t going up as fast as their opponents’. Right now we just know they aren’t scoring as well, but with the benefit of knowing how much participation they have (but are really wasting), we would then also know that they AREN’T putting (the right kind of) effort in! Their ratio of time-logged to score-earned will be very low, which tells us they aren’t working as hard as other servers! (They’re crafting or managing inventory or afk or otherwise not playing WvW. )This is vital information and can’t be determined by player count alone.

We need to compare the way the score goes up to how much time players are (or aren’t!) actively spending playing the WvW “game.” So by comparison, a server playing smart coverage is going to have relatively low time logged compared to the points they earn, which again speaks volumes all in one ratio.

There is a tangent point to be made about the difference between truly “away from keyboard” and “idle” (in the sense of crafting or inventory management but not actually out fighting and contributing), but I’m going to save that for a new post.

Ayrilana.1396:

I answered that above but didn’t want to leave the impression I was ignoring this part of your post.

Yes that’s a good point too. Please don’t be offended if I don’t quote every single individual point. I’m trying for a conversation here, not a presidential debate. Conversations flow and progress (whereas forum threads tend to rehash the same points over and over and I’m trying to avoid that cliche) so I’m okay with cherry-picking only the bits that resonate the most.

http://www.gw2score.com/home is a good place to see stats per-world.

Ayrilana.1396:

Throughout the entire post you are referring to the number of players. You do mention player hours but all of your arguments are centered around the number of players. […]

Yeah I’m really not, but arguing the point isn’t going to get us anywhere so let’s let that go, eh? In fact, I get what you’re saying across the board, but most of it strays away from the goal of this thread.

You have at least helped me refine my idea though. I do now believe the best way to implement this is to still record player time, but to do that within each PPT tick and publish the “player minutes” via the API along with the tick score.

You could definitely also publish a raw “player count” (I wouldn’t complain) but on its own that metric is disappointingly useless because there’s no good way to count how many players participated “in a tick” in the first place and any way you counted it would be completely inaccurate without measuring the amount of effort those players exerted in that 15 minute window in the second.

Imagine if you had 400 players all log in and immediately log out inside of a 15 minute tick. That “400” count doesn’t mean anything without also knowing that only 5 total minutes were logged in that tick! On the other hand, “5 minutes” on its own tells you plenty even without knowing the exact number of players that logged it, but I can see the utility in having both—again, I wouldn’t complain. The more useful of the two is definitely minutes though, hands down.

Ayrilana.1396:

WvW is won by numbers. Coverage is just having the number of players during a particular time frame.

You’re probably right, but neither you nor I can prove it either way without ANet publishing more “numbers” than they currently are. That’s what this thread is really about.

thaooo.5320:

Money is a highly necessary part of WvW for some annoying reason, you can’t entirely blame players for seeking it out.

Yes this is an excellent point. Even building upgrades, however insignificant a cost they may be to some players, are a drain on your wallet but entirely necessary in order to play WvW “well”.

Ayrilana.1396:

I saw the same thing done in your initial post too when you said you wanted to normalize scores. I also could see it being used to lessen the worth of a win by many people.

I could see how you might take it that way, but I think the key difference is that in most of my posts and replies I repeatedly talk in terms of what players could do with the information, not ANet. I did my best to emphasize that this was for our (players’) feedback purposes only, but honestly this point doesn’t matter since it should be totally clear by now.

Ayrilana.1396:

You’re not going to be given a list that this person played this many hours on this day. All maps have a cap which makes average players a more reasonable metric. If you were given the PPT on a map in the form of a line graph, and then overlayed the average players on the map, you’d probably get a good idea on how well a server was doing with gaining/maintaining points per player.

I respectfully disagree. Average players is close, but I don’t think it’s enough. I’m not interested in “per player,” I’m interested in “time per player”. The WvW maps already track on a per-player basis how long you’ve been idle for the purposes of kicking you if you are AFK too long. Additionally, the /age command proves they are tracking your logged-in time individually. In other words, the timing mechanisms are already (mostly) in place. All of the personal XP and Event tracking is also already in place (obviously).

I’m not saying they could just “turn this on,” but aggregating the total player hours (or minutes or whatever) a world is racking up (probably per tick, actually) would definitely not be outside the realm of technical possibility by any means.

Ayrilana.1396:

This is better than hours since anytime a player is spending time on a map, they’re holding a spot on the server. All data could be collected at set intervals (every tally perhaps?). There’s probably no usefulness to knowing how well a server performed during specific time frames so it could be brought to a broader spectrum of every 8 hours or every 24 hours. I’m pretty sure that they already monitor the number people on a map so it shouldn’t be too difficult to provide this data over a set period of time.

I’m afraid this would defeat the purpose of providing the data I’m suggesting. We want to know as exactly as possible how much effort a world has exerted in order to earn its score.

I’m talking about being able to calculate “miles per gallon” for a world. Right now we have the “miles” (war score), but we don’t know how much fuel a world had to use (player hours spent in WvW) in order to earn it, and when they were driving uphill (working hard) or coasting downhill (exploiting coverage). The only way to determine which worlds are most efficient at earning points is by being able to track how much work it took them to do it and when they exerted it over the course of the match.

Even if ANet published a world’s “minutes logged” via their API along with the score for each tick, I bet that would do the trick! 1 player playing for all 15 minutes logs—no surprise—15 minutes. 100 players playing for an entire 15 minute tick collectively log 1,500 minutes for that tick. Comparing that against the 425 points that world ticked (plus any incidental points earned through kills, etc.) gives you a rough breakdown of how hard they are working to get those points in that exact timeframe.

Charting that over the span of the week I think would be outrageously useful.

insanemaniac.2456:

asked for this 1.5 years ago
no response

Please by all means link the old thread here! There’s no guarantee ANet will respond to anything here (that’s why they sent me here instead of answering my support request after all) but the best we can do is keep it in front of their eyes.

There’s been a lot of talk here about coverage vs. skill. The way to measure the average skill of a world is by dividing the score by the units of time invested to achieve it.

If one world’s group of players spend 4,000 hours to score 150,000 points and another spends 2,000 hours to score the same 150,000 points, then the second world is clearly more skilled, right? But we can’t tell that from the info ANet gives us today. Yes, obviously, this only tells us who is (mostly) better at PPT right now, but it’s a start.

I have a proposal up about this here: [Suggestion] Publishing WvW Player Hours

I also recommend people go read Kraag’s ideas about rewarding defensive play. I think they are pretty great in concept and would help with the conversation over here too.

I love almost every one of Kraag’s suggestions a little up.

Ayrilana.1396:

That won’t work as you’re ignoring coverage which is a more determining factor into who wins or loses. […] Have you applied your suggestion to past results to see the outcome?

Thanks for your comments. I replied in the other thread to help keep things on topic here.

Since we’re talking about ANet’s lack of progressing on improving WvW here, this actually seems like an appropriate time and place to pimp this suggestion thread: [Suggestion] Publishing WvW Player Hours

On the existing point of defense— It is completely a thankless job…except for the world score. The problem is that there’s a disconnect between you sitting in a tower for 4 hours managing upgrades and fending off the occasional havoc group looking for an easy vacant cap, and your world winning the weekly match because you alone helped tick higher for that entire 4 hour span.

If you think big picture like that, then it makes a lot of sense already to play this “thankless” defensive game (when you already have enough people on offense to keep the enemy zergs busy of course), but unfortunately it doesn’t cater to the, “I’m going to run with the zerg to maximize MY points/achievements/xp/loot,” mentality that seems to grip most people.

It’s the definition of selfishness vs selflessness.

Ayrilana.1396:

Server A gets a score of 210,000 with 400 players online the entire week.
Server B and C get a score of 50,000 each with only 96 players online the entire week.
Server A barely wins.

You may have missed it— I didn’t propose changing how scoring works, only adding additional information. Server A would still win in a landslide with 210,000 vs 50,000 vs 50,000. This addition wouldn’t change that in the slightest.

Ayrilana.1396:

You’re also completely ignoring coverage which play a larger role in why servers win than just larger numbers.

Again, I’m not ignoring it. My suggestion is meant to highlight the situation you describe (but won’t change it, no.) You’re absolutely right that playing “smart” by taking everything quickly and then using minimal effort to protect it is a fantastic strategy, but worlds won’t necessarily realize that this is what they need to do until they see that not only did they get beaten 210,000 to 50,000, but that the winning world also did it with half the effort. That’s the really key part.

Right now it’s too easy to look at a scoreboard like that and say, “well, I guess nobody played this week.” That could be the exact opposite of the truth, but ANet doesn’t currently give us any way to know that.

Ayrilana.1396:

I suggest using past data and running the numbers under your suggestions. There are several sites that have past WvW scores logged. You can then make a reasonable estimation on what the average WvW hours were. I did it by average players over the course of the entire week in my example as that’s easier to estimate than hours.

You can’t use anything from the currently available data to “estimate” the values I’m talking about publishing. That’s kind of the heart of the whole issue, in fact. Average player count doesn’t tell you enough of the story. I’m sorry, I just don’t know how to explain it so that it’s easier to understand that the existing scoring sites can not help with this. Can anyone do a better job at it than me?

smithkt.8062:

I’m saying for lower population servers, the lurking crafters artificially inflate the reported player hours and would have an effect on the conclusions being drawn from the data. Get rid of the crafting stations and you can be more confident that the player hours reflect the people who are actually participating.

Ah yes, that makes sense, but what I’m saying is that the score is going to reflect that the world logged a ton of hours but didn’t score many points. That exact result would be your feedback for convincing people to get out or get to work.

However, if the map isn’t full and the crafters aren’t stopping real competitors from entering though, then there’s no effect on the existing scoring mechanism, which to me seems fine. What I want to know about is when people who aren’t participating are suddenly preventing my world from scoring better, and that’s only going to happen when the map is full and the crafters are blocking fighters. (I would love to have that problem, by the way!)

smithkt.8062:

Hard to believe, but I’ve been on my own borderlands at times where the guys at the crafting stations outnumbered the active players. I play enough, that I can recognise the active players from the crafters.

Nothing sucks more than trying to rally a defense and realizing the player pool is a bunch of crafters.

Yeah I definitely sympathize. It’s not too bad on my world, but when you run past 10+ people at the entrance and feel good about that as an indicator of your numbers, then find out later that nobody responds to /map chat, it sucks.

A big part of winning a battle is having more people. You may not like that fact if your server is small or doesn’t focus on WvW (like mine), but it’s still true. So another way to handle imbalanced populations might be to leave the population itself alone, but look at the score as a ratio of participation.

See my idea here: [Suggestion] Publishing WvW Player Hours. This would tell you how good a world is per player-hour spent in WvW.

For lurking crafters to be an issue, the WvW map would have to otherwise be full. At that point it would be in the world’s best interest (in terms of WvW) to ask the crafters to make room for fighters, but I doubt you’re going to run into that much.

And yeah, removing the stations entirely would probably work too, but that’s probably more of a tangent from publishing logged player hours for each match.

smithkt.8062:

Total players hours will be skewed, particularly in the lower tiers by the people that spend hours at the crafting stations.

I was thinking more about this, and actually reporting player hours might help this problem. A world that has people sitting otherwise idle, “just crafting,” in WvW would probably score much lower (relative to their logged hours!) than one where everyone is out fighting hard. They would have high hours and low score, and that’s exactly the feedback that world needs if they want to improve their WvW standing.

And if that world just doesn’t care about WvW and people still craft in WvW maps, well then it won’t matter to them what their score/hours were.

Eliandal.8735:

However, I have NO interest in seeing points per hour, especially if that information is public! I spend far too much time (being one of the few who bother) doing mundane things like escorting Yaks (over 6000 now ;P), making sure upgrades are running, tagging and setting up siege.

I 100% agree! There is no individual reward for doing the defensive tasks that allow your world to hang on to capture points (other than overall world score of course). I do this myself frequently, stationing myself and guildmates at a “vulnerable” tower and providing enough siege coverage to deter all but the largest zerg attacks. It’s an important part of overall strategy, but sorely overlooked due to the offense-heavy weighting of the point system, which is designed to encourage aggressiveness.

I definitely meant that you should be able to view your own personal progress during the match. This would let you set goals/limits on your participation and track your own improvement both directly in points you contributed to earning, and how many hours it took you to do so.

But no, I wouldn’t want that to be published publicly per-player either. Thanks for helping clarify that point!

smithkt.8062:

One important step would have to happen along side this: get rid of the crafting stations.

People actually lurk inside WvW maps to craft? That’s kinda nuts! I mean, I’ll stop to sell off junk after a respawn, but always on my way back into the fight. Wow.

MasterYoda.8563:

To many players types all wanting/having different in game objectives etc is why server population is so lopsided as its now. So hour cap per server or on players per week? No just NO as this solves absolutely anything at all.

I agree. The solution here doesn’t need to be changing the rules of the game; it’s just providing the right information so that players can make educated choices about how and where to spend their in-game time.

Aly Cat.9415:

There are also ways to compensate for coverage, such as strategic map hopping.

Map hopping can not allow 5 people to defend against100. 5 people can not be in enough places to protect targets from 100 people, regardless of how you split the 100.

Knowing that your weekly score was a result of “only having 5 people” (hyperbole of course— just following the example) as opposed to being equally matched in numbers but outclassed in skill is a pretty important distinction to me and critical feedback for improvement.

A world that has low participation needs to focus all of their effort on only that— participation. Because no amount of skill among those 5 players is going to make up for being permanently Outnumbered the entire week.

On the other hand, a world that is logging “the same” number of player hours as the other two but routinely getting out-scored DOES need to work on their strategy. That’s how they are going to reach the next level of play. They have the people, now they need to learn how to work together, so to speak.

The people that aren’t watching the WvW ladder aren’t going to care either way but this proposed statistic is the feedback mechanism that’s going to let those that do care know where to focus their energy. My server could use this.

NinjaRobot.4635:

As much as almost everyone would love to see this data anet will never publish it. It would be proof how how coverage beats strategy every time and how stupidly broken the tournaments are.

All the more reason to pile on this thread and at least evoke an official response! We definitely can’t expect anything unless we know that we have their attention first, right?

Yeah that’s exactly what I want to know! My home server didn’t do so great in the spring tournament, but it would be a consolation to know that we lost because we didn’t have enough people and not because we totally stink. ;-)

And like I said, if it’s more obvious to people that score is tied to getting bodies into WvW consistently, then it may help with participation on the worlds that aren’t always packing WvW completely full 24/7.

NonToxic.9185:

I would lower the max players per map, forcing players from enormous servers to spread out amongst all the other servers to avoid queues.

This is a good idea. In fact I posted about how tracking player hours would highlight the disadvantage less-full worlds are at here: [Suggestion] Publishing WvW Player Hours

Perhaps an interesting side benefit would be being able to track your individual participation. Knowing that you personally logged 34 hours during the weekly match, and helped earn 14,065 points for your team (not exclusive, since other people probably helped capture those towers and camps too.) I think this kind of feedback would be a lot more helpful towards improving your performance as opposed to WvW Rank.

I edited the topic title.

Maybe the title of my post is misleading. I’d rather get people on board with the idea of seeing published participation stats than simply get agreement that the current arrangement is participation-based.

This is not what happened. Please read my post again. I opened the one remaining chest that I had never previously opened and got fragment #1 again.

I have visited Scarlet’s Lair underneath the Priory twice. On the first trip with my guardian, I was able to open 4 of the chests and I received the first 4 Journal Fragments. I was missing enough Cypher Fragments to get the last chest though, so I left and placed the Journal Fragments in the bank.

After obtaining enough Molten Cypher Fragments, I put the 4 Journal Fragments in my ranger’s inventory, returned to the Lair and opened the remaining chest. This gave me the first Journal Fragment again!

So was I an idiot for going in there with a different character (even though I had the foresight to take my existing fragments with me)? Or do you have to open all 5 chests in a single visit? Or is this a bug of some kind?

I doubt I’ll be able to collect enough cypher fragments to open ALL of the chests again, especially since nobody seems to be doing the Marionette anymore, so I feel like I’m well and truly screwed.