Showing Posts For gorgewall.4901:
So, I placed a lot of buy orders a week or two back. I mean, a LOT of buy orders, and these were all filled. Filled so much I couldn’t possibly take all the crud I was receiving out of the TP due to a lack of bag space. Filled my inventory, filled my bank, filled my guild bank, and there’s still stuff sitting in my TP.
Now, while working on some extra space for all this crap (more guild banks, natch) I stopped buying and started SELLING. Some things I sold immediately to buyers, others I threw up at the lowest price, and so on.. yet the money from these transactions, including those that I sold immediately, never got into my TP. I’m thinking at this point, hey, maybe they’re stuck behind some kind of transaction overflow buffer, and the newer stuff I’ve bought (and the proceeds from things I’ve sold) won’t be processed until I clear out all this stuff cluttering up my TP ‘Take All’ button, right?
So I’ve filled up three more guild banks with.. stuff.. and it would appear my proceeds are still nowhere to be seen. There’s still a big fat ‘0’ displayed above my Take All button, my cash on hand isn’t increasing magically, and items I know I bought haven’t showed up. TP queue is completely empty. Did all this stuff just vanish into the ether and screw me, or.. what?
Mesmer Portals to move troops to enemy siege weapons: COOL
Mesmer Portals by hiding Mesmers to move troops into keeps/towers: COOL
Mesmer Portals to move troops (and the Mesmer) from the ground onto walls: NOT COOL
Mesmer Portals to trigger the ‘invisible players’ issue: NOT COOL
We’ve gotten to the point where people aren’t using Portal to make speedy attacks on nearby catapults or to retake a tower that wasn’t swept properly, but to completely bypass walls and intentionally Mass Invisibility enormous numbers of troops over and over so that the other servers have to fight a bunch of people they can’t see. It’s bad enough that in any large fight there are going to be some invisible guys, but usage of Mesmer Portaling to force this behavior instead of moving troops around is bordering on exploitation. Cue the cries of, “It’s a valid tactical strategy,” and “Everyone else is doing it, so we have to just to keep up.” Fantastic, but don’t pretend like it isn’t a bunch of crap either way. You can be a kittenhead while acknowledging the fact you’re a kittenhead.
It’s not an “exploit”, it’s a sound strategy for turning the battle to your favor. Get over it.
I don’t care about the “Invisible Mesmer Portal” shenanigans, but I was miffed at this Norn or Human clown in Ad Idem [AI] from DB exploiting onto walls via Mesmer portals last night. Twice I watched this guy on the ground, outside, drop his portal, run up to a wall, then drop the portal ON TOP of the wall from outside and port his forces up and in. It’s bad enough you make 70% of your points when everyone else is asleep, but you’ve got to pull this exploit out the moment you face a force large enough to oppose you? Stay classy, Ad Idem Mesmer Guy.
Go control the map and win while the enemy wastes time, siege, resources, and players in the jumping puzzle.
You think they’re going to leave if you provide them a constant stream of entertainment and badges in your pitiful attempts to unseat them?
Catapults deal their splash and knockback through gates like anything else. It can sometimes be difficult to repair gates due to the AoEs of attackers on the other side. As an Engineer, I utilize my knockbacks to hurl people off rams placed too close to the door all the time. It’s just how things are.
Catapults firing over gates to land outside is only possible at those gates where there are gaps between the gate and the wall. Not all gates have these. Those gates that do can also be fired into from outside.
If a catapult inside a keep is preventing you from utilizing rams, I suggest you figure out some way to mitigate this, say.. by dropping trebuchet fire into the tower, or employing clever placement of rams.
You can join the Toast or be part of Sea of Suckers. Your choice.
Well, it’s just turned 4:30am CST, which means it’s about time for everyone but Dragonbrand to go to sleep and watch as the map turns blue. How.. predictable.
There are only two ways to solve this problem before Anet decides to fix it:
1) summon a hundred Australians out of nowhere to staff the other servers
2) destroy the server that effortlessly sweeps across the map at night, during the day
As we at TC learned last week, the most effective way of countering night-capping shenanigans is to completely obliterate the server responsible the moment they no longer have the population advantage. We worked alongside GoM to destroy SoS every day, but unfortunately GoM’s population and strategy was not up to snuff around the clock and they rapidly petered out—leaving TC to take the map all day, since SoS’s NA players quickly became demoralized and spent the rest of the week seeking treatment for broken noses instead of fighting back.
But this match will be different, as I’m sure we have the population on all three servers to max out queues during the NA primetime, even if one server becomes a little dejected. To that end, it behooves us honorable denizens of the Desert and Coast to throw our combined sand into the eyes of those dragon-lovers and minimize the gains Dragonbrand sees from their tide of WvE-ing koala-huggers.
Sea of Suckers has enough of a NA population to fill queues during the primetime. It’s had them in the past, and it has them now—the North Americans just aren’t showing up for duty because of the extreme imbalance in the point spread right now. That’s understandable. I wouldn’t want to wade into WvW knowing I’m doomed for the week and the other two servers will be gunning me down out of spite, putting us on the defensive and losing territory all evening despite having equal numbers.
If you’re a North American right now and your server isn’t heavily queue-capped during the primetime, stay where you are—SoS has enough people to fill their zones when they feel like it.
Now, if you’re an Australian or other off-peaker on SoS.. I invite you to transfer literally anywhere else. Clumping together on one server’s just going to make you the target of the other two servers in whatever matchup you find yourself in, because they’re going to want to make up the point loss from all the nightcapping you will inevitably do. The less your server nightcaps—by having a more equal night population with other servers to the point that you can’t dominate the board and get an 8k lead in a few hours—the less you’re going to get ganged on in the day, and the less your NA primetime team’s going to not want to queue up as a result. And, hey, you’ll be doing every other server a favor by equalizing the population. Remember—you’re an NA server with a huge Oceanic base, not an Oceanic server with too few North Americans.
As an Asuran player, I frequently had my Flame Blast obstructed by the ground when running around, and always when attempting to combo it. The problem, I believe, is three-fold:
1) I’m short. I’m not minimum height, but I’m still shorter than a human. These fireballs aren’t shooting out of my head, so it leaves me thinking this projectile is lower to the ground when I shoot it than when, say, a Norn does. It’s easier to hit a hill, and while that might make sense realistically, this is a videogame and everyone’s hitbox is supposed to be equal and all of that jazz, so this is no good.
2) The camera positioning system. I, like most people, use the right mouse button to rotate my camera and turn my character. I don’t have Turn Left/Right bound to keys anymore, only Strafe. When I’m running around, my camera is tilted towards the ground: it’s not level with the horizon, otherwise I’d never be able to see the stuff I’m running over. I imagine most people play with more dirt on their screen than sky. This is an issue because projectiles take a course on a line from the camera position through the character—meaning about three inches in front of my feet. This is doubly annoying because it means any “manual aiming” of the fireball is probably going to smack the ground unless your camera is level with the horizon, in which case you can’t exactly judge the distance to get a proper fly-through-and-burst, now can you?
3) The projectile tracks the course of enemies at the moment it’s fired. This is normally a good thing, but it becomes problematic when combo’d with knockbacks/downs—one of which we have on our kit. I’m sure everyone at one point has tried to Air Blast to knock an enemy back, then followed it up with Flame Blast in an attempt to roll the shot through them and explode before they can recover. That’s a pretty basic move, right? ..except it won’t work unless you have some serious delay involved, delay that 90% of the time means the enemy is up, running at you, and thus will miss the explosion. What I believe happens here is that when a foe is knocked back and down, and you immediately follow the Air Blast up with a Flame Blast, the heading tracker on Flame Blast sees the enemy falling “down” to the ground, and calculates a path below where they will come to a rest—it thinks they’re going to keep falling, so it fires to intercept them. Except the ground is in the way now. Oops.
It’s so unreliable I’ve sworn off the flamethrower entirely, as Flame Blast was the largest component of the kit’s damage, I thought.
Some that just popped up in the earlier patch (not today’s Oct. 3rd/4th patch):
Using an Elixir skill while underwater will trigger the cooldown of another, DIFFERENT Elixir skill in the same slot while above water. Previously, this was not the case.
Ex: if I have Elixir B on my 9 key underwater, and Elixir S on my 9 key above water, drinking B while underwater will trigger S’s cooldown.
I’d say MCL has the right of most of it, with the following addendum re: SoS.
SoS maintained leads over the weekend due to nightcapping—and again, when we say “nightcapping” we really mean “there’s a 40 man population gap in every area due to timezones”. They were on their way to clinch the whole matchup Monday until disaster struck: TC got miffed, summoned extra people to fend off SoS for as long as possible during the nights, and utterly DESTROYED the SoS day/evening crew with help from GoM to the point that, like GoM, SoS’s NA players have given up on the match. Now, instead of having to fight SoS and GoM for the pie during the NA primetime, those two servers have decided “screw it” and handed us the whole thing. It’s rather a boring affair now, but TC’s current domination is not due to people being unable to show up because of timezones, but rather an unwillingness to show up because the match has been decided and SoS is put into a bad position the instant TC and GoM have the population to fight back. I’m sure SoS could match us in numbers 90% of the duration of NA primetimes, and GoM probably 40%, if the match were even and everyone was interested in fighting for the lead.
All in all, GoM has the lowest population of the three servers. I’m sure they hit queue cap during some hours of the NA primetime at the weekend, but I’m also sure they were capped less. SoS probably has the largest population all told, but they’re not good enough for the bracket and the stomping they receive (both legitimately from one server or another, or from both at the same time as “revenge” for the Aussie nightcapping) has utterly demoralized them to the point of not showing up.
Another disappointing week for all three servers, courtesy population imbalance.
They could easily save it if we got the equivalent of Realm Ranks from DAoC.
Extra abilities based on how many people you kill basically.
How does that solve anything? The people who get in a legitimate war during some hours of WvW get some small statistical benefit, and this is supposed to help them.. stop the nightcappers? In what way? Because the nightcappers, who haven’t really fought as many people, won’t have those benefits? That assumes the nightcappers aren’t murdering people dumb enough to try and break out of spawn, getting their own Ranks. That assumes the people who play during primetime to get those Realm Ranks are going to be fighting the nightcappers, too. That assumes the power of the Ranks is enough to allow 20 Red to beat 40 Green.
DAoC’s whole system was different, even before you get into the idea of Realm Ranks.
The (not-entirely-based-on-fun) “point” of competing in RvR—the buffs—were granted on an at-the-moment basis for holding territory, much like Orbs. GW2 distributes the global buffs as a byproduct of score; you can’t lose your 12% Gathering buff even if you get wiped off the map.
RvR but you in contention against other members of your server. Your own community. You’d see the same guys week after week on the enemy side, and you’d come to know the guilds, and if people really wanted a fair shake they’d play other-realm characters. Then, the whole balance of RvR often shifted based on the buffing of various classes. Classes were Realm-specific, so it was possible that Midgard was just “better” than Albion, mechanically, this month or that month.
GW2 takes the approach that everything should be fair. We’ve all got access to the same classes and everything. To ensure even match-ups, they use a modified Glicko system to rate servers and pit them against other servers that should be on an equal level of play. Where this falls flat is that Glicko systems work based off skill. If you want to extrapolate “skill” to a server-level, let’s say we’re talking about overall coordination and tactics—the strength of one zergling or Marine out of a ball of 50 isn’t necessarily important, it’s how the player macros and micros them around the map, when they complete upgrades, how much they know about the state of the enemy’s side of the map, how well they can defend and attack certain points. But the current point scoring system gets thrown incredibly out of whack by timezone, and it doesn’t even consider time of day a factor. It’s blind to when you go to sleep or how many people are playing at 6am in some part of the world.
What happens then? Well, you can get servers which have really crap coordination and tactics overall—low skill—in high brackets. They’ll lose a majority of even (with regard to numbers) fights, but make up all the points and then some in 10 hours when their off-peak playerbase wakes up and sweeps the map. “But,” you might begin to argue, erroneously, “is that not an indication of the off-peak players’ superiour coordination and tactics?” No, silly-billy, because if they needed organization and tactics, it would be to overcome a numerically equal force. What happens in practice on most servers is that 40 off-peak players run around and find a bunch of empty towers and keeps, and the ten enemies on the map say “screw this, I’m out,” and everything falls without being contested.. because it’s not actually contestable.
So now you’ve got a bunch of people filling the queues at primetime absolutely getting their faces pushed in the entire time they’re playing because they’re outmatched in tactics and coordination, so that’s no fun for them.. another server that’s just wiping the floor with everyone and wondering when they’ll face an actual challenge.. and going back to the first server, a bunch of Australians or French-Canadians who wonder when they’ll ever find someone to fight other than Keep Lords and NPCs.
How come the majority of the people who keep insisting that WvW is okay are the ones who are on the servers who do the nightcapping. This is interesting.
I’ve noticed this, too. Then again, you can’t mention nightcapping on my server (which gets nightcapped) without getting ten people crawling up your butt about how it’s fair and how dare you try to ban Australians from the game and oh but we nightcap too when they’re asleep so it’s oka—hey, there it is: “We nightcap too.” Is that supposed to make me feel better? If it’s crappy when it happens to us, it’s crappy when we do it ourselves.
I really have very little hope for the future of WvW.
I also have a feeling if there were monthly rates the vast majority of pvpers would of cancelled by now.
BGs in WoW probably still aren’t balanced, but that never stopped anyone. Then again, BGs were a grind for statistic gear and titles, not server pride or status. Here, they’re only necessary for.. well, cosmetic gear.
This… I hardly look at the score at all… I didn’t miss it in DAoC and I don’t need it in this game either. All it seems to do is make people cry about “night capping”.. as if other people are only allowed to play when they are online.
Benefits for WvW accumulate over time as a product of doing well at given times. The final score is indicative of not just who is “winning the match overall”, but which server has the biggest buffs as a result of it. DAoC provided buffs for control of the keeps at that moment—like Orbs—not by tallying five points per camp every 15 minutes, and so on.
[EDIT]: Going to move the rest of this to the nightcapping thread to avoid derailing.
(edited by gorgewall.4901)
In your example, the next day server A and server B should be ignoring each other and picking on server C to regain lost ground…so the solution is in their own hands. This is just an example of poor tactics, and misdirected opportunism (lack of ambition) to only reach #2 position on 3 server fight. Put simply, they give up and scramble for #2 position and fight each other for that place.
You don’t even think your own ideas through before suggesting others implement them, do you?
Assume C here is Green, and the others are Red and Blue. Assume they, like you say, realize Green as “the true threat” and team up to utterly stomp Green during the day. Green gains no points for a whole 12 hour period, and Red and Blue equally divide the map, coexisting. Green still comes out ahead.
Teaming up against a stronger enemy only works when you’re seeking to deny them points when everyone is strong. During primetime, when everyone’s queue capped, 70 Red + 70 Blue can pressure 30 Green off the map, or even 70 Green into near-oblivion. That’s because 70+70 is 140, which is bigger than 70. But at night? Can 20 Red + 20 Blue (somehow miraculously working together) hold on to enough points of their own against 70 Green? Nooope! That’s because 20+20 is 40, still less than 70. Even then, this assumes some amazing cooperation on Red+Blue’s part for defense of each others’ territory. It’s easy to team up to beat the same guy out of towers on different parts of the map, but can Red+Blue fight one Green zerg side-by-side? Can Blue hit the back of a Green attack force at Red’s keep and resist the temptation to try and finish the job Green started? Probably not.. but even if they did, they’d still be losing to Green.
And this is where the problem comes up. Two servers will always have each other for competition during their primetimes, when they are expected to make points. They have to share a pie. One server, arguably the weakest, gets the whole pie for himself because no one was around when he walked into the kitchen. At the end of the week, that’s seven pies for Green, and only 3.5 for Red or Blue.
WvW’s only enjoyable now if I don’t have to be the guy spending for upgrades and siege, since 9 out of 10 times anything I do late my time is going to get wiped out by nightcappers who face no resistance as they sweep across the map—a waste of my money when said siege merely makes it easier to defend during primetime and isn’t the only way we’re holding on to something.
The nightcapping scourge, which can fly both ways on certain servers, is something that’s going to screw with the matching system forever and ruins the enjoyment of all involved.
It’s certainly not fun to knock over empty Keeps, sitting there at rams for five minutes.. when people say they enjoy that, I imagine what they really mean is that they enjoy the 53k experience and 1.2k karma that flies in for no effort.
It’s not fun waking up to see the map is an entirely different color, when you had your own third (or slightly more) not ten hours ago.
It’s not fun dropping cash on stuff that won’t last four hours if you spend it near the end of primetime, instead of the start.
It’s not fun losing a matchup because while one server faces no resistance at night, you don’t have an opportunity to pull the same nightcapping shenanigans because that THIRD server is actually contesting you during the day, trying to split the pie that the first gets to eat by itself.
The benefit of this is that they have ZERO North American Queues at this time.
Ahaha, yeah, sure. NA primetime SoS is just as stacked as TC when they have a shot at winning, but after the utter buttblasting they take every afternoon from GoM+TC recapturing what the Australians steal at night, SoS gets miffed at losing everything instantly and stops showing up.
If you really wanted to give a server numbers, you’d hit up GoM—they don’t hit the queues as readily as SoS during NA times. But I guess they don’t have an Australian population to serve up 10k point leads for you every night as they roll over empty towers uncontested.
Grenades will benefit greatly from Precision and investment in the Tools tree (which increases critical damage). Consider that with each chuck of your grenades, you are making three attacks—three chances to crit. I use food like Ghost Pepper Poppers (40% chance on crit during the day to stack Might) and with my high crit build it becomes absolutely silly.
I run the following, though I mostly WvW and I will occasionally sub out the Firearms and Tools talents for Rifle range and Swiftness on switching, or Elixir S for U.
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#McMM9czmavGMmavoMxf9MpVkqVMs
For standing there like a schmuck and never dodging, this puts out some absolutely ridiculous damage. Dungeons and other content where you can’t reliably afford to stand still will weaken the usefulness of this, but with proper utilization of your Rifle’s Net and Overcharged Shot you may as well grow roots and never be touched in melee anyway.
generally only event-related or otherwise important NPC conversations will actually show up there.
It’s mostly informed by whether or not there is other chat activity within a certain timeframe of when an eligible NPC dialogue line shows up. If /y is jumping constantly and you stand next to NPCs who are talking about non-event matters, it won’t show up.. but if no one has said anything for half an hour, you’ll see the same meaningless NPC dialogue about having peach pie for dessert last night in your chatlog.
As for secret ruins, dig this:
Rata Sum
muRSaat
The Asuran have proven empirically (it’s scientific fact—you don’t get to argue with it) that certain races are more important to the Eternal Alchemy (that is, the Universe) than others. The ranking is thus:
Asura > Sylvari > Charr > Humans > Norn
I may have the order of those last two mixed up, but I believe that’s correct. Either way, they’re such distant contenders that it hardly matters.
Meanwhile we’re getting absolutely DESTROYED 2 hours after majority of Oceanic players left. Want to know why? I’ll give you a hint, no NA players want to play on an Oceanic based server, can you blame them?
First, you’re not on an Oceanic-based server. You are on a North American-based server with a sizable Oceanic presence.
Second, you are being destroyed because GoM and TC woke up to see the map covered in green (SoS) and that really miffs everyone something fierce. There’s now two servers with populations close enough for a decent fight to your own marching into the fight and seeing nothing to hit but you. Now your numbers have to defend against twice as many (because there are two servers here) on multiple fronts. There’s confusion, people calling for help here and there, players are spending time running to defenses that fall as soon as they arrive, they can’t get inside a tower and die in the field and respawn, yada yada, utter chaos and disorganization and just generally not a fun time.
But hey, let me entertain this bizarre notion that when Server A is sleeping, C is awake, and thus when A is awake, C must assuredly be sleeping as well. Let’s assume for a moment this is actually true, a completely hypothetical situation: one entirely NA server (A) vs. another entirely NA server (B) vs. a third entirely AU server ©.
AU Primetime: Server C takes everything; they’re awake, A and B are asleep. There’s not enough people on A and B to defend anywhere other than EB, so you see every borderland fall to C, with maybe a Garrison holdout in each homeland. Huge point gains, and C gets several uncontested hours of owning nearly everything. 12k lead in imaginary numbers. Then the clock ticks forward and..
NA primetime: Server C goes to sleep, and Server B wakes up. Server B takes everyth—actually, wait, no. I forgot, there are two NA servers here! They can fight each other. They will fight each other. The territory of C, utterly undefended, is divvied up between A and B. Then the clock ticks forward and the cycle repeats..
Completely oversimplifying things for the purposes of this scenario, C holds the whole map for 12 hours of the day, for 1k points an hour (again—simplifying): that’s 12k points. B and A hold halves of the map for the other 12 hours, for 500 points: that’s 6k points each. At the end of the day, we’re looking at a score like: C-12k, B-6k, A-6k. The next day is the same. The day after that is the same. And so on. At the end of the week, C has twice the points of B or A, or equal to both of them combined.
Here’s where we run into that problem again. Even granting that after the AU population nightcaps a server, it is then their turn to be nightcapped, they do not have any competition for those points during their own primetime. The other two servers, both with NA primetime numbers, even if the AU server is completely and utterly absent, which just doesn’t work out that way in practice on some servers, have each other for competition—they’ve got to divvy up the pie that the AU nightcappers got to themselves. There’s still an issue here.
Assuming you are correct then SoS has picked up more NA players recently. Therefore they will climb out of your bracket and soon face servers with equal NA/AU/SEA coverage in Tier 2.
Yes, I’m sure the only reason your ~TiTaN aLLiAnCe~ is dominant in WvW is population at all hours of the day. For all your blustering and tactics and organization of guilds and whatever, you’re only just as skilled as the lowest common denominator of player, and it’s solely throughout-the-day population that sustains anyone a position at the top. Right? Is that the message you want to send out?
Except, wait, that’d be crazy. That’d mean you’re a sham and this whole thing is just a ridiculous numbers game all of the time, instead of some of the time. SoS won’t get out of this bracket, because despite all of their night capping shenanigans, they’re not good enough to be in the current one. They get absolutely destroyed during the NA primetime because TC’s evening teams are more organized and skillful and successful than SoS’. That last part’s important: more organized and skillful and successful, NOT more populous. We beat them in fair fights, man-to-man, even if they start out with the territorial/upgrade advantage from night capping.
And, cue the cries of our Oceanic team not being as strong. Nonono, see, we don’t have an Oceanic team. We don’t really have NA night/morning presence outside of EB. Strength of various teams doesn’t enter into this equation, it’s only numbers of the various teams. And that’s the issue.
So, no. SoS is likely going to stay here because their gains during the night when populations are uneven can’t outstrip their losses during the day when populations are. If they do go up, it will be for a week until they are absolutely destroyed, then we’ll be right back down to this mess.
See, it’s in our interests that the rating system of servers and the matchups is informed primarily and overwhelmingly by the skill disparity between servers: whose best teams and strategies can beat the others reliably at times of day when queues are full. That’s when everyone can start talking about having a “stronger night team” instead of merely “having a night presence”. That’s the actual balance. Anything else is a number’s game and isn’t really indicative of the per timezone performance of any given server.
Does SoS NA enjoy getting rolled in the afternoon by not only more coordinated groups with better strategies, but to an often 2v1 mentality that seeks to punish them for night capping, being on the defensive constantly and only ever losing ground? Does SoS AU enjoy doing PvE content inside Keeps and Towers, only ever seeing half their own numbers if that, never having a sincere challenge outside of Eternal? Does TC NA enjoy stomping over an equally populous enemy that generally can’t resist them? Does TC NA enjoy the knowledge that all the money they pour into upgrades and siege in the Borderlands will be wiped clean and their point lead erased come 4am because it all falls while unprotected and unprotectable?
I do hope the answer to these questions are “no”, and we see where this is an issue.
You do realize, while Sea of Sorrows sleeps, Tarnished Coast/Gate of Madness will be nightcapping us? hear us complaining? no.
Oh yeah, TC and GoM are going to be nightcapping you at 4pm EST (5am in some parts of Australia) despite SoS being queue capped at the same time.
This is what you guys don’t understand: you’re playing on a North American server. While you, the Oceanic players, are asleep, there are still more North Americans on your server playing. You have a sizable, even queue-cap reaching population during the NA primetime. You are the only server with a sizable population during the AU primetime. This is where the disparity crops up. It’s not NA vs. NA vs. AU, and everyone takes turn night capping.. it’s NA vs. NA vs. NA+AU, and SoS does not really have a nighttime to be capped during.
At the point in the day where SoS has its lowest population in WvW, be it NA primetime or AU primetime or anywhere in between, the population disparity between SoS and the other servers does not even approach the disparity that exists between us during the AU primetime.
So, for the umpteenth time, in the hopes that it really sinks in:
6pm EST, Australians are asleep, SoS NA team is awake — I have to fight a full compliment of SoS
6am EST, Australians are awake, SoS NA team (and all others) are asleep — you have to fight a bare-bones crew of GoM/TC everywhere but EB
That’s what the nightcapping is. POPULATION DISPARITY based on timezones. It’s not “capping when it’s 5am in this part of the world or that part of the world”, it’s “capping when your server has a 40 man advantage in every WvW zone”. That magical time just happens to be when the majority of players on the server, a North American server, happen to be asleep—the night time for them.
I don’t know whether TC and GoM should be teaming up to punish SoS for nightcapping and mitigate the damage that their massive point gains at night do to our overall balance, or wailing on GoM for the Orb fiasco early on Saturday. I would prefer the former—as long as we don’t see our Orbs magically fly away again.
As for OP, there’s nothing wrong with being opportunistic. Sure, it’s annoying when it happens to you, but we’d be lying if we said we on TC didn’t manipulate the map in such a way that we encourage GoM to hit an SoS tower that’s R.Gate+Metal, using up their siege and time to make it happen, with the intent of sweeping in ten minutes later and plowing through their dinky wooden fort like butter.
You are in a PvP zone, performing a task that rewards you with PvP items—siege blueprints and badges. Not only that, but the dungeon already has traps built-in that exist to hinder or otherwise prevent enemies from completing the puzzle: spike traps, rolling boulders, flame spewers, chains that release dangerous mobs.
I’ve camped the puzzle and “griefed” as it were, but wasn’t it a fantastic tactical maneuver on my part that with just one siege engine I could shut down the puzzle progress of two enemy servers? For the investment of 6-12s (free, if I got them out of the chest) and two friends’ worth of supply, one man can hold multiple enemies at bay. He can get them raging in chat, spending time typing when they could be fighting. He can get them to try and zerg into the puzzle in a desperate attempt to rush down the siege, drawing off the greatest resource in the zone (manpower) and providing his allies with an easier time out in the actual WvW zone.
When you see camping in the WvW puzzles, you need to make a judgment call: is dying repeatedly, spending 30 minutes trying, and/or tying up multiple allies in attempting to fix this as good use of my time? Chances are, no. If there’s one guy with one arrow cart, yeah, you can take him out if you’re particularly savvy, or if you and just two other guys drop a ballista real quick and blow it up before he can deal with you. But if there’s ten enemies from the same server camping the puzzle.. why bother? That’s ten enemies that aren’t defending towers, that aren’t trying to take your towers. You should be out in the zone maximizing your advantage while they handicap themselves. Let the OTHER server zerg in and waste players beating their heads against that wall. Now you’ve got TWO servers who have multiple players that are not participating in the primary goal of Eternal Battlegrounds—taking and holding towers/keeps/castles/camps.
Also, welcome to online gaming. Griefing is half the fun!
Using Mesmer Portals to move people around is a valid tactic. That’s what Anet is talking about.
Masses of players (friendly or not) that were not loaded by you previously suddenly running onto your screen and being invisible is an unfortunate limitation of the engine and/or whatever restrictions Anet has placed on rendering to prevent low-end systems from exploding.
Unfortunately, these things overlap. But the use of the first does not belie an intent to “exploit” the second. Know that in many situations, you are just as invisible to the appearing group as they are to you. And, if it helps you sleep at night, when the enemy rushes in with enough players to be invisible, you were almost certainly going to die whether or not you could see them. As soon as you see a portal complete near you, take that as your cue to get out of Dodge.
With regard to suggestions in the vein of: “make Outmanned provide some statistical benefit to combat capability so that players with fewer numbers are mechanically stronger,” like Orbs on crack or something..
..haven’t we seen how that works in WoW, with the buffs in Wintergrasp and the like? Did anyone enjoy unkillable Druids who could maul ten people to death just because the Druid doesn’t have any backup?
Are you saying zero people on your server logs on at Oceanic time?
No, we’ve got people in the zones at night. EB stays capped well into the night and only ever drops to being moderately populated, and our own Borderlands will field a respectable but not capped number of players until they’re ground down to a Garrison, but it’s all at the cost of players from the other two Borderlands jumping ship to more populous zones because they can’t compete with the numbers of the off-peak server.
People keep making this weird strawman argument where the only situation nightcapping or population imbalance could possibly be “a thing” is if one or more servers just have absolutely no people playing WvW at a given time. It’s not about having zero people to move around, it’s about having far fewer than your opponents. If Servers A and B have 20 people each in Server A’s borderland, and Server C has 60.. A and B are going to lose territory. That’s all there is to it. Even if A and B completely ganged up on C in that zone and worked side-by-side miraculously, C has the overwhelming advantage. It’s not because C is playing better, it’s because C simply has more people to throw around by quirk of the time zone. And you get into a negative cycle where people start losing solely due to numbers, and they leave because it’s not fun.
Read that last part again: it’s not fun. That’s why we’re playing WvW, or any game, in theory—to have fun. But getting destroyed because you have a simple numerical disadvantage through no conceivable fault of your own is not fun. Games and sports don’t put people at a handicap like that unless it’s to make things more difficult, a penalty for breaking some rule, or there is some statistical benefit that is supposed to make up for the numerical deficit—none of which applies in GW2.
The game already does one thing to ensure fair matchups: it changes who plays against who from week to week based on their performance in the previous match, so that servers that did poorly fall down and fight presumably weaker opponents, and stronger servers move up and so on. However, the very integrity of this system is weakened when a server can move up not because it did well in general, but because it did obscenely well in a slim time frame, especially when, for the duration of said time frame, they outnumber their opponents 2:1, or even 3:1 in some cases.
I see this repeated argument (not necessarily here, but in /t and /y in various places) that a server is “strong” because it has a big Oceanic presence, or that’s “their strength”, as though it is in any fair way equivalent to another server’s “strength” of “being coordinated at 6pm”. Having more players is not a strength, it’s having more players. There’s a cap on the number of people who can be in a zone per server to begin with to keep things fair, because everyone with half a brain realizes that things are most fair when you have a 10v10 or a 20v20 or a 50v50, not a 25v50. If population was really supposed to be a dominant factor in determining who wins (not that it isn’t the case currently, but I’m saying here that if it were actually intended as a design goal) you would see a queue system that is designed so that Server C can field 128 because B has 102 and A has 70, and those slots that were reserved for A are “wasted” due to A just not having that many people interested in WvW, so their slots may as well be given to whoever can grab them first.
Populations should be encouraged to equalize. It’s the fastest route out of this mess and something that any MMO strives to do to begin with. Keeps loads manageable, keeps areas out of overpopulation, and helps avoid someone walking into a zone and being the only man there.
Tying into this, there’s one actually fair point from “the other side” I’ve seen brought up with regard to this, and it’s that splitting the Oceanic players up evenly across all NA servers means they can’t find anyone to do PvE content with. Putting aside the notion that (humorously, the opposition attempts to use to its benefit when it comes to WvW zone population) a zone is realistically almost never completely devoid of players, Anet has already put in a system designed to ease overpopulation that could, with some tweaking, be used to alleviate underpopulation: Overflow.
Imagine, a shared Overflow buffer for every zone that you could click a button to willingly port yourself to, rather than only ever seeing Overflow when you’re in an overpop zone. Suddenly, the three lonely Australians in Cursed Shore on each of the 24 NA servers press a button, and there are now 72 of them all together, plus whoever else wanted in on the party. Benefits to everyone, not just Australians, but.. say, the whole of Kaineng, and even my server which is not exactly jumping in Orr at 4am, even if it is a weekend.
Then their server has a weak NA team and a strong Oceanic team. Nothing more to be said.
People keep saying they’ve got a “strong Oceanic team”. No, “strong” does not enter into it. They have “A” Oceanic team. They’re the only ones in this matchup that has a huge late night presence. They get to win at night by default. That’s the problem! It’s not about who’s better or worse at night, it’s about who is actually there at night.
SoS has a weak NA team that doesn’t belong in this bracket. They’re only here because the fact that they actually have Oceanic players shoring them up with points they barely had to work for has falsely inflated their ranking stats.
And their NA presence is less numerous than your server’s NA players.
SoS and GoM do not have lower NA presence than we do. SoS matches us player for player minute by minute just counting the NA people; it’s the Oceanics that throw it off. GoM matches us during primetime when it matters, but begins to falter around now, like it is doing. Currently GoM doesn’t have a queue in three of four zones. SoS is hitting queue caps right now same as TC is.
Its simply not true there is resistance.
Yeah, the Keep and Tower Lords are as strong at night as they are during the day. Whoo.
If you try to take a TC tower in our Borderlands during the NA primetime, you’re going to have to deal with 15+ men on a wall and another 20-25 swooping in from behind you for a pincer within 5-10 minutes.
If you try it during the Australian primetime, you’re going to see ~5 on the wall, and 5 desperately trying to get inside. Sure, maybe that counts as resistance, but considering the attacking force is going to have the same number whether it be NA or AU primetime, the resistance is much less for the Aussies. This is why people start complaining about night capping. The Oceanic pop servers aren’t winning at this point in some matchups (like this one) because they’re better, but because they are more numerous.
But that’s just this matchup. It doesn’t do the pro-night capping argument any good to say, “Well, on MY server, it isn’t a problem! There’s people to fight 24/7! There’s always queues. We face the same resistance!” Fantastic, then your server doesn’t have a night capping problem. I’m sure Henge of Denravi, Stormbluff Isle, and Jade Quarry only have to worry about the disparity in power of the day/night teams, which is legitimate—not a disparity in population. But that doesn’t hold for every server in every match up, and as you go down the ranking list, night capping becomes increasingly more of an issue. I don’t know much about ET, IoJ, and CD, but they might not have this problem. Dragonbrand vs. Blackgate vs. Fort Aspenwood? I’d put money on Dragonbrand sweeping up right now, because I know they’re loaded with Australians.
The above guy is saying it’s okay for the other server’s NA players to be weaker than his server’s NA players, but it’s not okay for his server’s Oceanic players to be weaker than the other server’s Oceanic players.
Did you read the rest of the post? I said that SoS does not belong in this bracket, or matchup, against TC because they are not decent competition during NA primetime, which is when every server in this matchup is hitting the queue in every borderland. They’re only ranked as high as they are because their point tallies have been inflated match after match by the nightcapping of their significant Oceanic population.
It’s not even that our Oceanic players are “worse” than SoS’s. It’s that they are not as numerous. If SoS, TC, and GoM were maxed out for queues at 4am and 8am EST and SoS wiped the floor with everyone, yeah, that’d evidence that SoS’s late night crew or their Oceanic crew or whatever is just “better” than the other servers’. But those queues weren’t full at this time last night, and they likely won’t be an hour from now. GoM’s isn’t, currently, so it’s really just TC vs. SoS. And soon? It’ll be SoS vs. a handful of players from the other realms, which basically means it’s SoS vs. PvE content, steamrolling nearly-empty keeps and tower, “winning” experience and karma without the risk of being pushed back, losing other territory, or having to put up extended sieges.
And at 2pm, GoM and TC will completely thrash SoS for their nightcapping because SoS will have overextended beyond what it can hold, and they will lose more territory than they realistically should due to momentum, an inability to defend on every conceivable front, and generally not belonging in this bracket.
This is what nightcapping gets everyone: an unfun experience. It’s not fun for me spending money on upgrades and siege knowing it won’t last more than four hours after I go to sleep. It’s not fun for me waking up to see one server controls 90% of WvW and has T3 everything. It’s not fun for me steamrolling a bunch of people who can’t fight back on equal footing despite their defensive advantage and the numbers to do so. It’s not fun for SoS’s NA team to be constantly on the defensive and losing territory for the entirety of their play. And I can’t imagine it’s fun for the SoS “night”/Oceanic team to walk over nearly-empty towers.
What I do think that SoS team enjoys, however, is the practically free experience and karma, and all the WvW buffs it brings them.
Let me get this straight, when NA players from a primarily NA populated server get all thier points from an outnumbered NA force playing on a primarily oceanic populated server during the ‘day time’, it’s fair game.
But when the oceanic population get home from work (night time) and the roles are reversed, it becomes an issue?
No, when NA players from a primarily NA populated server fight other primarily NA populated servers that are all running full queues at NA primetime and the server with an OZ population happens to lose because they were outplayed/everyone teamed up on them/they’re in a bracket that’s too high for them, it’s fair game.
But when the NA servers by and large go to sleep and the one server with the most Australians sweeps over the entire map and takes keeps and towers without facing any resistance, it becomes an issue.
I’m in the TC/GoM/SoS matchup right now. We absolutely OBLITERATED SoS during the NA early afternoon and primetime not because we outpopulate your “Oceanic server” while you are asleep, but because your NA primetime team does not deserve to be in the bracket you are in, and neither do you. GoM and TC teamed up to punish and destroy you for nightcapping and we took back our territory with a terrible vengeance that ground you guys down to a meager 50 point tally at one time. This is how it’s going to be until SoS stops nightcapping. They’re going to get an inflated score for rolling over stuff uncontested, then they’re going to get ganged up on because they’re in the lead and lose way more than they have to due to the other servers momentum, then they’re going to get beat up nonstop and demoralized because this just isn’t a matchup befitting their skill level. And at the end of the week, you’re either going to finish first place and go up a level to a match where you’ll get destroyed during the day even harder because of this pop imbalance, or you’ll finish second and remain in a bracket you still shouldn’t be in.
Put the queue cap on a slider that lowers to be proportional to the population of the other servers in the match up.
During the “day”, when everyone is hitting up against a, say, 100 player queue for each server, everything is fine and operates as normal.
But then “2am” rolls around, and people start going to sleep. Two servers now have 90 players in a given zone whereas before they had 100; the “off peak” server is still hitting the queue.
Now it’s “3am”, and the two servers have 80 players each. This is where the system kicks in:
Lower the queue cap from 100 to 90 for this server match-up. The extra ten people still playing for C don’t get booted out—they get to stay. They’re supposed to be lost due to attrition. Some of those guys are “on peak” players and will be going to sleep.
The more players that Servers A and B lose, the more you lower the queue cap, to a predetermined MINIMUM. The “off peak” server still keeps a population advantage, but the system works to make this only a handful of players, not the 40+ man zergs that run around and take territory uncontested.
The beauty is that the system is self-regulating. It doesn’t impact servers that have 24/7 queues at all. Henge of Denravi and whoever they’re facing in their matchups are still going to have the maximum possible queue size at every hour.
And the “off peak” players who are now getting queues to WvW in their primetime, whereas before they weren’t? Well, now they know what it’s like to be “equal” to the “on peak” players who have large queues during their primetimes.
However, unlike those “on peak” players, the “off peak” have a big advantage. While EVERY server may have a full WvW queue in every borderland at, say, 8pm EST, you can be sure that at 7am EST (primetime for some Australians, for instance) that is not the case. If you happen to be hitting a queue now, due to the self-lowering queue caps.. you could transfer servers to one that doesn’t have the queue. You get the benefit of getting in instantly, AND potentially increasing the queue cap on the server you just left, letting another of your fellow Ozzies in. It spreads everyone around if they don’t like queues, and fosters actual competition at all hours of WvW—not a late-night zerg playing PvE in the WvW zones.
This also works with or without any new point tallying modifications. The goal of fiddling with queues is to PREVENT the imbalance that causes territory (and thus score) to shift solely because of population and being Outmanned.
This really isn’t about hardcore alliances dominating. The servers where “night capping” is a problem are those that do not have alliances; if they did, they’d be matched up against other servers with them, and you could be sure these guys would keep the queues full 24/7 and territory would shift based on which server had the better “team” at any given point.
Unfortunately, on servers where population does drop off severely, it’s not about having the worst team—it’s about not having a team period. 20 incredible players are still going to lose to 50 in a zerg.
Capping the servers even lower depending on the population of lowest server would not be fun. Let’s say two servers without overlapping prime times go against each other. Nothing really changes but a lot less people get to play. In addition, population imbalance is part of the game which can actually make it more fun.
There is no universe in which being outnumbered 4:1, as can happen in WvW now, makes a competition more fun. And I reject the notion that lower caps make for less fun overall due to fewer people playing; the people in the populated zerg are steamrolling over what is essentially PvE content at this point, and the underpopulated servers are getting demolished without being able to put up any resistance. There’s definitely no fun on the latter part, and whether you can have “PvP fun” doing PvE is debatable. WvW already uses a Glicko system to create fair match-ups based on server ‘skill’, but what we see in many cases is that skill takes a back seat to population shift. I have been on both the zerging end (when there are no defenders to stop us and we take the entire map) and the opposite, and it feels unsportsmanlike in the first instance and infuriatingly unfair in the latter.
Would that I could interest more people in WvW, but instead we find that these late night map control switcheroos only discourage people from playing on the losing side, exacerbating the problem.
Also, it’d have to be balanced in such a way to prevent people from emptying WvW during certain times to purposely deprive the enemy of points in lieu of not being able to capture/defend objectives.
I doubt it would end up being abusable. Since the system would set a minimum threshold for the queue size based on the lowest pop, you won’t run into a situation where there’s ten people per server on a map and besiegers can’t possibly defeat a ‘heavily’-defended position. A server with low pop on defense will still have fewer players; the disparity between the two forces will simply be not as severe. Instead of a 40 man difference it might get cut down to 10 or 15, which is much more manageable. As for emptying a server to deprive others, if you somehow miraculously convince your entire server to just leave WvW, you’re still stuck at a minimum for the queue size, so there’s going to be enough attackers to take everything back. That, and your server leaving the borderlands does not force the overpopulated server to get kicked out—anyone in there when the queue size drops gets to stay.
A variable tally time is just one step on the path to fixing the late night disparity in many WvW matchups. Some have disliked the idea due to the notion that it tells certain people who may only be able to play at X time, such as Australians or late-shift workers, that their contribution is less valuable. It’s not about the perceived value of the individual helping out the server, it’s about whether it’s fair that a server with a large late night (from the perspective of purely American servers, or purely European servers) population be able to utterly dominate the map and take control of every keep and tower practically uncontested, not because they are better, but because they have later bedtimes and are merely more populous.
We already see that Anet does not match US servers against EU servers. This is partially for lag’s sake, but even if you were to magically eliminate latency across the ocean, you would get tremendously unfun matchups where the entire map is practically guaranteed to fall into the hands of the US servers at primetime American time, and into the hands of the EU servers during the American morning. So it is with servers that have large Australian populations or have a playerbase large enough to support hitting the queue at night when other servers can barely muster 20 players per borderland.
So, in addition to adjusting tallies based on time (and population—more on that later) there should be some kind of shrinking of queues to match the less populous servers. Example:
Let’s assume that for every Borderlands, there’s a max pop of 50 players per server, and 100 per Eternal Battleground. These are hypothetical numbers. During the ‘day’, all servers are hitting the queue and have their 50 players in every borderland and 100 in the battleground, for a max of 250 people WvWing at any time. At night, Server Alpha has such a large population in general, or such a large Euro/Aussie/WeirdLateNightPeople population that they continue to hit their queue limit, while Servers Beta and Delta pull in 30/60 and 20/30, respectively. Realistically most people will jump ship from enemy borderlands to protect their server-owned BL or Eternal, but let’s forget about that for a moment. So what happens? Obviously, Alpha sweeps the entire map, holds it all for eight hours, and gets a hugely inflated point score. When Beta and Delta wake up, they’re not only way behind when it comes to points (and Orbs), they are fighting an uphill battle against what are almost assuredly a 3 Orb server with control of the entire map and at least T2 upgrades to every tower and keep. It’s going to take them a long time just to battle back from this, during which Alpha’s point lead continues to grow.
Now, if there were some kind of intelligent algorithm that could look at Beta and Delta’s population, note the time (4am), and decide, “Hey, this isn’t quite fair—let’s drop the queue so it’s 30 for BLs and 50 for Eternal,” eventually, through attrition, Alpha’s enormous zerg will diminish. They don’t need to be forcibly shunted out, just prevented from upkeeping their huge numerical advantage. It gives Beta and Delta a chance to fight on even terms.
It’s great for longterm WvW health because not only does it promote more intelligent matchups (face it—the best metric of server strength in WvW was who was leading between the reset and late night, not who was in the lead before the reset, when the late night advantage had already reared its head) but doesn’t feed into the vicious cycle of, “Oh, we’re losing in WvW, why would I even want to jump in there now and get zerged to death? Why do I want to spend money on siege when it will only get blown up by the zerg? Why would I want to upgrade this Keep before I go to sleep knowing it will almost assuredly be destroyed by the zerg within two hours because we have no defenders?”
The beauty of the system is that matchups where population remains high all day don’t have to be impacted by it. I’m sure Henge of Denravi has queues maxed out everywhere 24/7, and the servers they’re playing against likely do, too—in this instance, there’s no reason for the point tallies to ever slow for them, or for the queue size to drop at night, because the servers will always be matched evenly, population-wise. It is only those matchups where one or both servers are clearly falling behind in population at given times that the system should kick in and lower queues and slow tally times.
Remember that your weapon(s) and shield disappear into the void if you whip out any kit. Any Toughness you might have on a pistol, rifle, or shield goes bye-bye if your Flamethrower’s out.