Showing Posts For mortisha.6341:
Deeply troubling…. Half baked, partial measures shouldn’t take eight weeks to announce. If you believe this is a flawed design, double shame on you for your inability to maintain a clear design perspective.
This is tantamount to Bank of America saying,” Thieves continue to persist in attempting to illegally steal money from our banks, so we are removing all paper money from our retail stores and ATM’s until we rethink it’s value. – Hope this doesn’t affect your desire to keep banking with us. “
You are falling down in supporting WvW, the centerpiece of your product. Even anecdotal evidence shows the steep drop off in participation week over week.
Best match-up since launch. I can’t believe we were still within 100 points of each other, almost 1 week from the start of the match-up ( Thursday Night 2300 hours GMT -5 ). It’s been a pleasure to fight with and against you all.
See you again in a week,
Mortisha
Colin,
If you have this data, what’s the harm in being transparent with it. Transparency would go along ways to alleviate the frustration of perceived in-action on these core WvW issues.
Fine, if you want to protect your total server numbers as industry secrets, but publish Deltas ( aka Population transfers in, population transfers out – Delta / Velocity ).
To tag onto the comments above, when a really close match-up is changed dramatically by the perception of transfer ‘funny business’ ( switching sides, massive influx etc ) this is frustrating your customer and will result in the loss of active users and a decline of ARPU.
-Mort
(edited by mortisha.6341)
Hi,
All drama not withstanding and with the caveat that I am speaking on behalf of my server , Dragonbrand has nasty queues for WVW when it counts ( Friday, Saturday / Primetime ). Please don’t recruit for us, we are fine. If it’s not working for you all on BG, try one of the lower population servers who are actively recruiting. I am sure they would welcome positive, result oriented players like yourself.
-Mort
I am not really calling for a change to the borderlands maps. It’s likely impractical from a ROI perspective. At a high level, I like them in concept, I am simply attempting to point out possible root causes for the population imbalance between them and the Eternal Battlegrounds. Move time spent in negotiating the terrain, is less time flipping objectives.
Further, I would like to set aside the idea of people coming into WvW to farm mobs / resources. I don’t agree that this is healthy for the product as it’s depriving a seat to someone who is their for WVW. At best it’s a secondary aspect of the WVW experience and tangential to the points I am trying to make.
As a leader who has operated a team of 5 – 15 players in WVW since launch, I will state that the Eternal Battlegrounds pays ( in all ways : Gold, Karma, Influence ) at much higher rates as compared to the BLs. Often 3:1.
Clearly this is a second order problem as compared to other Anet priorities right now, general population distribution, stability and exploiting. I think this issue will bubble up in priority soon, so I would love to see it make it onto a solution roadmap in the near future.
Thanks for the comment love.
-Mort
Lets set aside the first order problems of overall population clumping and queues. Anet has attention on this problem and I trust you are looking at incentivizing the behaviors you want to see ( it’s not going to work until you do ), some greater distribution of the WvW population across more servers.
The second order problem, which deserves design review now to avoid being the next herby, is why do we see such a large preference for playing one map over the other three. The queue length data-set shows that Eternal Battlegrounds is the overwhelming preference.
I speculate, but my point of view is heavily influenced by my team and their preferred activities:
Number one Reason – Getting paid.
The eternal battleground has better resources, better drops, and a larger ability to influence the map and flip objectives at smaller levels of organization. Whether you’re looking for fun, Karma, coin, influence or items, the EB provide a better vehicle for obtaining all those things at lower levels of organizational overhead.
Recommended action – Normalize drops, coin and gathering nodes across all boarderlands to => Eternal Battlegrounds. This will provide better incentive to Queue outside EB with very little technical effort.
Number Two Reason – Boarderlands map design
This is not going to be an easy problem to solve. 3 out of 4 of the maps available are laid out in a very challenging, movement restrictive way. North / South movement is intentionally funneled through choke points which promote 2v1 pressure against the defender. I think I understand the design intent of making the maps centered on Orb Defense, but the corridors of movement created by the current layout make it far harder for small groups to flip objectives. This, intern, forces larger clumping and with it the associated overhead of larger force organization and coordination: Slowing the pace of action on the map, creating more static ( entrenched ) lines of defense; increasing the size of inevitable conflicts while slowing the frequency. All of these behaviors are pug/small group unfriendly. At it’s core, It’s a failure of objective size and quantity ( too few supply camps / control points ) and the large difficulty in horizontal movement.
Don’t get me wrong, if you are dealt into a strategic role in the boarderlands it can be a hoot. If you are not plugged into what your realm or alliance is working to achieve though, you are relegated to using the borderlands as a waiting room till you can go where you can actually have fun ( aka influence the map ).
Thanks,
-Mort
My next character’s name will be ’ ISpamF’ . Auto-loot, com’on.
I love metric driven design.
I get that Anet is awesome. They have made an awesome product.
Some of you guys don’t acknowledge the problem, thats ok. Lets see the data.
If transfers is the answer thenTransparency is the first step is resolution: Anet needs to publish the Queue times per server ( Avg ) so we can make an informed decision about where we can go.
If Queue times are part of the game to stay ( sad face ) then we need to know average Q time which roughly predicts when we can expect to get in.
If FiFo is the intended workflow to joining WvW queues, then we I’d like see acknowledged of the defect which is causing a great deal of volatility in queue times.
If think transfers are the right solution, please post where you transfered to so we can come join you.
-Mort
Dragonbrand Queue times during prime time vary from 30 minutes to 2.5 hours. Worse yet, they are clearly not FiFO.
I’ve already had a number of guild members say, " Email me when it’s ‘fixed’ and let me know when we are able to play together. I am not going to sit around for hours waiting to play with my friends. ". I expect a lot more of my team to give up shortly if the situation doesn’t improve.
WvW is, to my team, the centerpiece of this product. The queues today are a first order problem for both the game, our server and the buisness model.
I would like to see an acknowledgment of this issue as a priority for the developer.
Waiting for their customers to ‘consume less of our services’ is not a winning product strategy. Waiting to go on the ride is not the fun part of the theme park experience.
-Mort
Dragonbrand Queue times during prime time vary from 30 minutes to 2.5 hours. Worse yet, they are clearly not FiFO.
I’ve already had a number of guild members say, " Email me when it’s ‘fixed’ and let me know when we are able to play together. I am not going to sit around for hours waiting to play with my friends. ". I expect a lot more of my team to give up shortly if the situation doesn’t improve.
WvW is, to my team, the centerpiece of this product. The queues today are a first order problem for both the game, our server and the buisness model.
I would like to see an acknowledgment of this issue as a priority for the developer.
Waiting for their customers to ‘consume less of our services’ is not a winning product strategy. Waiting to go on the ride is not the fun part of the theme park experience.
-Mort
I would accept ‘overflow’ Eternal bgs where I am playing but Q’ed for the REAL EB. Overflows don’t contribute to the scoreboard. ‘Join friend’ should allow us to play together.
Dragonbrand Queue times during prime time vary from 30 minutes to 2.5 hours. Worse yet, they are clearly not FiFO.
I’ve already had a number of guild members say, " Email me when it’s ‘fixed’ and let me know when we are able to play together. I am not going to sit around for hours waiting to play with my friends. ". I expect a lot more of my team to give up shortly if the situation doesn’t improve.
WvW is, to my team, the centerpiece of this product. The queues today are a first order problem for both the game, our server and the buisness model.
I would like to see an acknowledgment of this issue as a priority for the developer.
Waiting for their customers to ‘consume less of our services’ is not a winning product strategy. Waiting to go on the ride is not the fun part of the theme park experience.
-Mort