Guild Wars 2

I find those long glides a big problem: getting the height. You know it’s right when the glide bar shrinks but most of the time it shrinks 2mm and then changes its mind and i crash into the side of the barrel. The sad thing is I managed it eventually yesterday enough to finish the JP for the diving point but today I can’t get it right at all. :-(

It can’t be a coincidence that the med pop servers in EU are doing worst in wvw. I see no real need for PvE players to move server en mass so variation in server population must largely be connected to movements of wvw players/guilds.

whatever solution to population needs to force wvw players/guilds to transfer downwards. easiest one would be adjust the levels of the ranks of population and then rename high and very high servers to full and disallow transfers. Have low as always free.

Lord Kuru.3685:

In NA: the devs warned people about stacking into T1. But people went anyway. There are no queues in the lower tiers. I wouldn’t be surprised if Anet intended for this to happen and they’re expecting people to destack because of it.

In EU: no idea. But there’s clearly a BIG difference between NA and EU in this regards:
NSP is ranked #15 in NA and there are currently no queues to speak of. (FSP, who has queues — see post above — is ranked #17 in EU.)

Possibly EU players are more concentrated in EU prime time whereas NA servers cater for the all the rest of the world except EU so NA players are more spread out over 24hours.

I agree with this in principle, except I’d say go further and have rallying and bloodlust only apply to level 80s.

in retrospect they should have sorted out wvw overflow maps before wvw achievements/league.

The queue here is not analogous to any type of physical queue like in a bank but rather more like the experience of waiting on a customer service phone line. The problem we all have with the queue are the psychological effects of uncertainty.

various psychological effects of waiting are known e.g.

Occupied Time Feels Shorter Than Unoccupied Time.
Anxiety Makes Waits Seem Longer.
Uncertain Waits Are Longer than Known, Finite Waits.
Unexplained Waits Are Longer than Explained Waits.
Unfair Waits Are Longer than Equitable Waits
Solo Waits Feel Longer than Group Waits

these can be read about here: http://davidmaister.com/articles/the-psychology-of-waiting-lines/

A further issue that increases anxiety is the prevalent idea that changing zones messes with ones queue position. So people feel they must stand around, doing nothing, and they can’t leave the pc in case the queue suddenly pops.

I’m sure overflow wvw maps will help this situation as people can occupy themselves with a version of what they want to be doing.

I don’t believe a wait time would help much. With small numbers its going to be pretty inaccurate and it would just be annoying to learn it can’t be trusted.

Queue position that diminishes could work. however from reports there’s already a queue mechanic that causes some people to get in before others who queued earlier so we don’t want to see actual physical evidence that the queue is treating us unfairly!

All in all I think we should wait to see how wvw overflow maps affect things.

it’s a pretty neat idea except
“2. If the map fills to capacity, mercenaries will start being kicked out.”

instead of this, have a fixed number of slots for mercenaries.

the thing that makes the most difference in wvw is guilds moving servers and we’ve certainly had a number of guild transfers in recent weeks.

It seems like a shame that the game doesn’t do more to promote organisation. The blob is simply the natural conclusion of individuals. herd behavior. However if there were more in-game mechanics of organization its entirely possible you get an organized blob instead. Which would be a worse situation.

Whilst it appears in the rankings (at least EU) that the blobbiest servers are at the top, the thing they also have most of is coverage. The position of piken and its organised guilds who have less coverage indicates that in the overall scheme of things blobbing might not be the most optimal strategy. If piken had 24/7 guild groups they would probably be the proof that organised is always better.

EU has an inherent problem with coverage as europe covers a narrow band of timezones. Language servers have an advantage because there’s incentive for those language speakers to join from other parts of the world. It can’t be a coincidence that there’s more specific language servers in the top half of the eu rankings. Except dzagonur and arborstone which suggests there’s one too many french and german servers.

fadeaway.2807:

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

It’s helpful to have one or two eles, but that’s it

Could you expand on this please? I assumed the more eles the better due to the aoe dmg.

Once again thanks all for the insightful replies.

my guild ran a night of staff ele only raid. ~15 staff eles doing meteor shower and glyph of storms all at the same time is an incredible sight to behold. At other times we switched to water and all healed the token warrior who charged the enemy by himself. Co-ordinated actions by a group of eles turns out to be a most effective unit.

Was impressed with the strategy and non blobbing of the guilds AoA and GoT in their borderland last night. Particularly defending bay.

However you guys (FSP & DL) ought to form an alliance, if only to make things more interesting for everyone. Winning by this much is getting boring and can’t be much fun for you either.

brakheart.1407:

what’s good in Piken is that almost all the population there is formed by organized clans. Therefore, you people can raid (let’s say) 5 different clans, with about 15 people each, and that way become a lot more effective in WvW and in blob fights. Sadly, here in Baruch we don’t have that many variety of premades

however the downside of that is when guilds have queuing issues our raids fall apart and there’s a lack of effective action in borderlands.

It seems to happen more in recent times that when there’s a big battle. Most of the servers turn up to join in so blobbing up to some degree is inevitable.

Maybe it’s partly RS’s fault as our guild raids had no chance of killing their entire server blobs. Piken used to be firmly against blobbing under any circumstances but necessity is the mother of invention and now people are more inclined to clump together in bigger groups than smaller groups. Our frequent lack of supply camp ownership may be a side-effect of this.

I don’t believe that site is checking properly.

if building siege gave wxp people would be wasting supply and building random siege all over the place.

most epic bay defense ever in psbl

I used to have this problem on my old pc. The cause was too high graphics settings with a 32bit OS. Even tho the game ran fine on medium detail there’s a hard limit of memory usage for programs in 32bit windows. it’s 1.5gb. For some reason using the portal causes the game to try and use more than that limit. The crashing stopped when I changed the detail to low. I suspect its something to do with the amount of memory required to load the textures. Higher detail more texture memory needed. More memory than 32bit windows will allow it to have.

LilMcGinley.3890:

To add on to this, zergs are common because of 2 things: no handicap for having vast majority of a map’s players in 1 area

the downside is they can only be in 1 place at a time,.

halving the borderland capacity is an unmitigated disaster for piken square as we’d gotten to the point where the server had enough guilds to mostly fill all the maps at primetime. Now we had to make a rota to make sure everyone gets a go.

also ive witnessed today, call target on raid leader gets lost every time they get culled, which is often :-\

zerg servers may have an advantage in this situation. Their members having been trained to blob up. It doesn’t matter who’s specifically is in the blob. Whereas guild raid servers are going to struggle when they can’t get enough people in for the raid to function effectively. Anet have somewhat shot themselves in the foot after saying they wanted wvw to be less blobby.

apart from other queuing issues, the prevailing opinion on my server is that the culling patch has halved borderland capacity. I’d rather have culling than the lottery of whether I and my guild can get in to wvw.

I agree, it makes no sense for a highly ranked (thus already busy) wvw server to have the cheapest transfers.

It could have been done that the cost was an equation that factored in wvw rank so the most expensive transfers were very high pop high rank servers and the cheapest med pop low ranked servers.

as is now there’s always going to more attractive choices than low ranked high pop servers.

safety in numbers and figuring out which commander(s) is more or less likely to get everyone killed.

at this point whether there’s a bug or not is immaterial. There’s clearly a big dissatisfaction over the act of queuing. The queue itself is not necessarily the problem but lack of knowledge about our place in it. In fact if we had more knowledge we’d be in a better position to quantify a possible bug.

customer dissatisfaction over queues would diminish if we had knowledge about the queue we were in. Simply knowing our position and/or the number of people in the queue before we decide to join would massively reduce frustration. As it is we’re completely blind and we don’t like it!

maybe the queue problem is a side-effect of people not being deregistered from wvw maps properly.

rhyein.6172:

It would also explain why you don’t see this problem on Friday reset, but it gets worse and worse as the week goes on.

it’s getting to the point of 30-60min queues and then you get to the map and there’s barely anyone there, nowhere near the 166 people a map can supposedly hold :-S

Just to be sure I ran a quick database query for the last few days and all the queue numbers look quite reasonable.

maybe there’s people falling out of the server side of the queue but the client still thinks they’re in the queue or keeps resetting their position. That could explain why some people’s queue is significantly longer than other people’s.
Or people leaving aren’t registered as left properly.

it seems obvious there’s a problem(s) somewhere….

alternatively put a massive jumping puzzle in heart of the mists and we won’t notice the queue length as much. xD

Without any concrete information from the game client its hard to know what’s going on. I’ve always felt changing zones broke the queue.

I suppose this is why people say go to heart of the mists. there’s nothing to do but stand around…put a big jumping puzzle in there and we won’t notice the queue length as much….

if the map pop is around 50-80 as has been suggested the queues probably aren’t that long. Maybe 5-15 people but at certain times people are set to stay in for hours so not that many people leaving so the wait time is longer but the queue clearly moves sporadically. There’s obviously a lot of luck involved. You can wait 5 mins and a bunch of people leave the map or 30mins and barely anyone leaves the map. Like being a queue at a bank. One person might take ages and the next 5 quick. So a person in the in the queue could have waited longer than ones behind them to get to a teller.

Still, knowing ones position in the queue would be a great comfort in the circumstances and we’d soon learn what constitutes a big queue.

I’m inclined to think the success of re-queuing is an illusion of sorts.

seems there’s a branch of math about queues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queueing_theory anyone smart enough to understand it?

and the psychology of queues
http://davidmaister.com/articles/the-psychology-of-waiting-lines/

something needs to be done about queues.

A lesson from behavioral economics : The London underground massively improved customer satisfaction by putting up signs indicating when the next train was going to arrive.

Because

“the nature of a wait is not just dependent on its numerical quality, its duration, but the level of uncertainty you experience during that wait. Waiting 7 mins for a train with a countdown clock is less frustrating and irritating than waiting 4 mins, knucklebiting, going “when’s this train going to kitten well arrive”"
source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOVqI0OOkvM

and in wvw queues. there’s an indeterminate wait, no clue on position in the queue and an invisible bug that breaks the queue.

Please anet tell us you’re going to improve this situation.

Maybe this happened to the cat:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110507033302AA08PVE

Immolator.5640:

Commander Ezekiel The Adept
Leader of Underworld Battalion [WvW]
Proud Soldier of Gandara

Your name rings a bell…didn’t you used to be on Underworld?

Did Gandara loose some wvw guilds? I’m surprised by their current lack of points and their weak performance in eb last night (at least in first couple of hours I was there).

Preventing zerging is going against principles of psychology that people clump together for shared purpose and perceived safety. But even zerging isn’t foolproof. Superior tactics beat zergs and the Achilles heel of zergs is more people are harder to control.

I vote map fullscreen. That way you can judge if there’s anyone around that might come and res you…or not. There’s no need for quick auto-respawn for people that die somewhere random so it shouldn’t exist anywhere else.

That’s a fair point. I agree; trying to hide does suck. I’m not sure it wouldn’t make general fighting harder when you couldn’t at a glance identify untagged enemies though.

the best implementation of player housing I’ve seen is in final fantasy xi mmo. But in that game there’s no banks and you have to keep your stuff in your “house” which is a one room “house” and you don’t get see an outside view. Although this sounds limited it does the job perfectly. a room to decorate and not lots of pointless outside space like in lotro where the neighbourhoods are ghost towns.

in order to communicate important guild reorganisation information to every member of the guild, my guild leader had to send 4 mails to each of 125 members. Now that is plainly ridiculous having to do that. Mail all would have saved a LOT of time there.

also the limits on how much you can type is far too small.

I suggest having guild tags prefixed on names in map public chat. This would increase the awareness of guilds in maps. Either those taking a more leading role and smaller guilds being vocally proactive.

PS are on the up. The other day we were -25 points and it wasn’t looking good. Since yesterday we’re now up +9.6. Now that’s a turnaround although I’m not sure what’s causing it.

Legendaries are the reward for people prepared to grind like mad or play a long time. Consequently not everyone will have/get one. It would hardly be ‘legendary’ if everyone had one. In any event if you think this is bad try final fantasy xi. After 10 years not that many people have one.

I get more when operating in a smaller unit than running around in big zerg.

Just time spent in wvw would be no good; eventually everyone would have it. It’s going to end up too many commanders and no obvious means to organise themselves.

They could make it so that only the members of a squad see the badge of their commander and have a commander only chat channel.

same error code. got booted just as I got eb access
EU piken

Apparently it’s a similar rating system to what is used in chess rankings. It measures performance with an added calculations of accuracy. Points on their own do not = performance. It’s possible to win with a worse rated performance than previously or loose with a better rated performance than previously.

Something like that anyway. the math is insane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system

Loosing people means you’ll get down to a core of people dedicating to staying and doing their best whatever happens. As more people transfer upwards there ought to be a tipping point whereby increasing wait times cause guilds to consider transferring downwards for instant access and the opportunity to work with more dedicated peoples.