Where do I get the salvage kit for the all the duplicate ascended rings that have been clogging my bank?
You can buy the new Asc. salvage kits from BUY-4373 in Fractals.
Apparently you can also buy them from the laurel vendors.
I checked the laurel vendor in the bl and he didn’t have it.
I’m just going off the patch notes, I can’t log into the game at the moment. Might try checking the laurel vendor in Lion’s Arch.
You need 5 proofs for the Maguuma scrolls, which are worth 10 hero points. So that’s 200 proofs per character for 400 points. I don’t know how many proofs you can get per rank up, perhaps someone can clarify.
You can also do some PvE too. It won’t kill you, I promise.
No, the Maguuma cost 10, you’re wrong.
I was going off the blog post, apparently they changed it. But you get 4 proofs per rank up according to a poster above.
You need 5 proofs for the Maguuma scrolls, which are worth 10 hero points. So that’s 200 proofs per character for 400 points. I don’t know how many proofs you can get per rank up, perhaps someone can clarify.
You can also do some PvE too. It won’t kill you, I promise.
I’ll take “Wildly overdramatic and premature topic titles for 200 Alex”.
It’s a bug. Should be hotfixed soon.
Ive just requested a refund from HoT. The BL maps are appalling – they didnt have an open beta with those before release did they?
You didn’t even need HoT to play in the new BL map. They had a few invite-only stress tests.
The expansion just released, you have barely explored the new map. Don’t kid yourself.
The proofs are only when leveling up? There are only 105 ranks but I need 400 proofs. Where the remaining come from?
?
You can earn an infinite amount of ranks in WvW.
Tried the BL maps again… wow are those horrible for roaming. Two fights after an hour.
So many regular WvW’ers are not in WvW right now. They’re checking out all the other stuff that dropped with HoT. They’re checking out the Halloween events.
Seriously, if anyone really thought WvW populations were going to be high right after the expansion dropped they were kidding themselves.
Where do I get the salvage kit for the all the duplicate ascended rings that have been clogging my bank?
You can buy the new Asc. salvage kits from BUY-4373 in Fractals.
Apparently you can also buy them from the laurel vendors.
I wouldn’t necessarily say consuming your liquid wexp consumables is the best option.
Even a short duration +50% wexp booster can generate way more wexp than one of the small consumables if you use it before a keep/SM take.
Many people like myself are fights oriented, when we see a blob running inside to hop on their siege instead of fighting, well ok thats fine they can do that nothing wrong with it. But that also gets boring and annoying real quick. When the balance shifts towards defense, offense slows to a crawl, which makes gaining ppt and points much harder. A healthy balance between fights and defense is best. If people just feel that building a ton of siege and hiding in upgraded objectives is all they need to do to win, then wvw becomes extremely boring for many people.
I’m optimistic about there being a healthy balance for this in HoT. If the most recent WvW stress test changes stick, arrow carts will cost an additional 10 supply each. And the new shield generator will block arrow cart fire with its bubble when traited.
Now if only Anet could find a way to make it so damage doesn’t go through gates, it would be perfect. The fact that a single defender with a gate treb can stop a 30-man gate blitz is kind of ridiculous.
Is the information in the link below still accurate? Are Applied Fortitude and Applied Strength effects still being removed and the cost of siege lines and such still being brought down? I haven’t heard anything on this in a long time.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/upgrading-world-vs-world-upgrades/
As of the most recent WvW stress test, yes those are accurate.
Saturday reset could be interesting depending on how close the match is. Was the intent with this to split the weekend, minimizing its influence on early match points?
Also stuck with 9 other players.
Also stuck, my whole match group, in a legacy of the foefire map.
I just want to point out for clarification that, from their description, the Memories of Battle will be a tradeable crafting material, used in crafting legendary weapons/precursors. Not a currency (i.e., not in the wallet).
The downside of trying to balance offense/defense for unequal teams occurs during peak times where population is relatively equal between teams. Currently it requires an attacking force to bring roughly twice the number of defenders and I hope that really doesn’t change because I’d hate to see an attacking force require three times the number of defenders.
I’m worried about this too. I think part of the problem is that blitz/surprise sieging is in a weird place right now, and I don’t think eliminating white swords is the right answer. All it takes is one dude in a tower with a gate treb to hold off an entire 30 man gate blitz indefinitely, and that isn’t fair, especially with T3 gates, no-more-pvdoor, and nigh unkillable cannons/oil/mortars on the way. We had some discussion about this in your long siege thread, but with the buff to gate defenses it’s no longer appropriate for treb/cata/player damage to travel through gates. This is already starting to be a problem in stronghold in spvp too, where players are just standing behind gates and taking out attacking npcs. If Anet doesn’t fix this, I don’t see anyone attacking gates ever once the expansion hits, unless they are paper and/or they are sure there are no enemies inside.
I’m somewhat optimistic that the longer travel times in the new borderlands might make blitz sieging a little more viable, but it still only takes that one dude with a gate treb, or with an unreachable AC along a cata wall, to stop a huge blitz. Little things like that seriously upset the balance of power between teams of unbalanced sizes, and it only gets worse when populations are even. Blitz sieges done by small, coordinated groups have to be viable, or all these defensive buffs are going to get real boring real quick.
As far as long sieges go…I think if there’s one change I would make, it would be to diminish the power of counter-trebs. If you build a bunch of trebs to take out walls from range, it’s dumb and boring that the enemy can just build a counter treb in a high place and safely kill your trebs. They already cost a ton of supply and don’t really do that much damage, and with T3 walls it takes a lot of them and a lot of time to really do anything. As a defender there has to be something that forces you outside to go take the attacking trebs out. I think this would make long sieges a lot more fun. In the new borderlands map it seemed like there were a lot less good counter-treb spots, so it’s possible this may become less of an issue once the expansion hits.
4. It will discourage fights unless you have a large enough group that you are sure you’ll win. Smaller groups will be heavily discouraged from fighting as they may just feed points to the enemy team.
Yeah, PPK has problems. A lot of unintended consequences of implementing a more robust PPK system.
That’s nonsense though. The thing about PPK, it’s points per kill. Small groups mean small points. If they die then that’s not really a big deal.
Tell that to the small groups that are feeding points to the bigger groups. If they do that over and over, it adds up, especially if PPK becomes a large part of the score (or even, as some people have suggested, the only part of the score).
Not to mention how exploitable this is. Enemy spies with free accounts on your server could organize en masse to feed points to their real team. How would you go about preventing that?
It doesn’t make sense to me to implement a weighted scoring system advocating for population-based equality in a game mode that was never designed to have balanced populations in the first place.
And it doesn’t make sense to have a scoring system designed for teams of equal size in a game mode that doesn’t have teams of equal size. PPT is always weighted in favor of the team with the larger size, which has had the result of rendering it meaningless with veteran WvW players. Points-per-cap makes much more sense and also avoids the complexity that a population-weighted scoring system would have.
Honestly, if this were sPvP I’d agree with you. There are no barriers blocking the capture points in sPvP and increasing the time to cap. Players often try to create artificial barriers using bunker builds, but even those have their limitations — other players can simply rotate around the bunkers.
But in WvW the maps and objectives themselves are designed (at least in theory) to act as a buffer, allowing some parity between teams of unequal sizes. The increased time to cap from walls/gates, choke points at objectives, the use of siege, all allow a smaller defensive team to hold off a larger offensive team.
So yes, PPT as a scoring system is usually used for teams of equal size, and WvW is not designed for teams of equal size. But WvW already compensates for this by using map mechanics to try even out the effect of population imbalances. If those mechanics are working properly, there shouldn’t be a need to also modify the score to even out population imbalances.
Many would argue (and I would agree) that the WvW mechanics implemented thus far over the past three years have not been enough of a buffer against enemy teams that outnumber yours. Anet seems to believe this too, since they are buffing defending with HoT (T3 gates, guild upgrades that boost defense, larger borderlands map that takes longer to traverse). I’m frankly a bigger fan of this solution — buffing map mechanics to compensate for population imbalances — rather than modifying the scoring system to deal with it.
As far as PPC (points per capture), I get where it could help, but I also fear that it would just end up making everything an EotM-style k-train, since defending objectives would no longer net teams any points (it would simply deny points to enemy teams).
4. It will discourage fights unless you have a large enough group that you are sure you’ll win. Smaller groups will be heavily discouraged from fighting as they may just feed points to the enemy team.
Yeah, PPK has problems. A lot of unintended consequences of implementing a more robust PPK system.
You cannot reasonably call a system that artificially gives different score values, at different times, for different reasons, to different groups, and label it as “equally”. Because it is very factually the definition of unequal.
If he was proposing such a system, yea it would not be equal, but he’s not proposing such a system. The weighted PPT he’s talking about would not be “different score values” applied “for different reasons” to “different groups”. That’s not even good game design (games with constantly changing rules do exist!). The system he’s proposing would be “same exact score values as every other low population times” applied “for one exact reason: population differences greater than x” to “one exact group: the population that vastly outnumbers the others” and this would be the same rule applied to all servers.
It absolutely would not treat all servers equally. The weighted changes would have to scale with each servers individual population throughout the day.
No it wouldnt. Scaled back PPT would be based on total population. Even if we make “50% PTT” below 20% max population, thats still around 200 players across all borders and servers.
I think we’re getting into a semantics argument here about the definition of “equally”. If by “equally” you mean population-based equality — treating each player’s contribution to the score relative to the total number of players online the same — then yes, weighting the score by total population would make things equal. But coglin and others have been arguing for time-based equality, whereby all time periods are treated the same with respect to the score regardless of the amount of population currently online. A population-weighting system would violate time-based equality because time periods that are more populated would be more valuable to the match per unit of time than lesser-populated time periods.
Frankly, as I’ve made clear in my earlier posts, I’m in the time-based equality camp. WvW was designed to be a 24/7 game mode, and the designers were surely well aware that populations would fluctuate during the week. It doesn’t make sense to me to implement a weighted scoring system advocating for population-based equality in a game mode that was never designed to have balanced populations in the first place.
How about simply having mergers of servers? whats wrong with that?
Because even on low pop servers, many have developed strong communities that they don’t want arbitrarily merged with others by Anet. Many players on those communities also prefer a lower pop environment.
There was a lot of talk about potential solutions in the CDI thread on population imbalances about a year ago (warning, long thread):
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Solution-to-fix-the-population-imbalance/first
I wouldn’t say there was necessarily a consensus, but many players seemed open to the idea of being able to form “alliances” (essentially, self-formed server merges). Functionally this would be similar to the current server system, just slightly more dynamic and potentially based around seasons.
Time-sliced scoring OK, but still doesn’t solve the issue with populations on one server not finding anyone to fight against on another server. Without needing to change scoring, have time-sliced glicko rating and match-ups. DB’s SEA can compete in their timezone against T3’s SBI SEA while DB’s NA can compete in their timezone against T4 servers. IoJ’s NA would be competitive in T8 while IoJ’s OCX would find competition in T5. LOL. Yea that won’t happen.
That’s just logistically a nightmare to work out. You start to lose the sense of what a “match” really is at that point too; you’re essentially creating 4 or more distinct matches a day, since you’d have to completely reset the map between time periods to accommodate the different server matchups. Which also makes upgrading objectives less valuable.
I agree that time-sliced scoring doesn’t fix the problem with uneven populations during a particular time period. Though I think it would have a long-term effect of encouraging some evening of server populations across time periods, since IoJ’s OCX would no longer benefit as much from severely overstacking their time slot. If they care more about playing with fellow OCX players, then they can keep doing what they’re doing. But if some of them want to have more of an impact on a match, then they’re incentivized to move to a server that needs OCX help.
If it’s true that most German speakers live in the CET time zone, then what does it matter if you recruit non-Germans for other time zones? You’re not going to be playing at the same time as them anyway, who cares if they don’t speak German?
When I was on SBI (US), we had a ton of Chinese and Korean players playing in the SEA time zones, many of whom spoke no English. No one cared, because there weren’t many English speakers playing at that time anyway.
When people speak even the tiniest bits of English they will join an international server instead of a German server and most people wouldn’t bother joining a server that has nothing to offer for their time zone to build it up themselves.
Even if a non-German guild would accidentally join they would be hardly able to interact with the rest of the community and thus wouldn’t bond to the server.
Is that true for Germans who speak even a little bit of English too? Do they prefer to join international servers instead of a German server?
I just don’t see how any scoring system is going to benefit you here in a 24/7 game mode like WvW. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to want to be able to have an official German server, which only Germans, who predominantly reside in a specific time zone, tend to join. And you also want this server to be able to score competitively in WvW, a mode which currently operates 24 hours a day over an entire week. Don’t you think that seems a bit contradictory? Why design a game mode to be 24/7, but then make it so that a server that only has population online during a small fraction of that time can compete alongside servers that have population at all times of the day?
I have to echo my previous post here. If we’re advocating for a system that weights PPT by the amount of population currently online, then what’s the point in the game mode being 24/7? It seems like an EotM style, 4 hour long match game mode would fit your idea of competitive play much better.
My problem is that most people can’t contribute 2/3 of the day due to sleep/work/school and for a majority these 2/3 are the same, so even if they completely dominate during the 1/3 they can contribute they have no influence on the other 2/3 where they might loose the match to a much smaller force.
I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on your other points. On this one, this is exactly what a time-sliced, scoring periods type of solution like what I proposed is supposed to address. It prevents enemy teams from running up the score overnight, just like a population-weighted system would, but without the unintended side effects of a population-weighted system that I mentioned. You may not agree with me that those unintended side effects will happen, or even that they are that bad, and that’s where I think we need to agree to disagree.
The fundamental difference between our two solutions is my system still places some value on even coverage throughout the day (it just limits the damage of too much coverage in a given time slot). Whereas yours removes that value entirely, focusing instead on just total PPT per player online. I think this is just going to come down to a subjective preference. How much do you want to value a server’s ability to recruit coverage and motivate its players to come out and play? Versus: How much do you want to value a server’s pure skill at taking objectives per number of players currently in the match?
If we go with your system, then I can’t lie, there’s not much point in WvW being a 24/7 game mode. “Off-hours” players on most servers (other than T1/T2) would effectively contribute very little points to the total score, and thus would have very little influence on the outcome of the match. At that point, you might as well switch to an EotM type system where matches only last 4 hours and “servers” are formed temporarily by pulling from current player populations.
Personally, I like the 24/7 match system, and I like the idea of player contributions from all hours of the day being equally important to the match. It adds to the epic feel of the game mode for me. If I knew that the contribution of off-hours players only amounted to 10-20% of the total score, that would significantly reduce the epic feel of WvW for me, as only the 6 hours of NA prime (on most US servers) would really matter. That’s my bias: coverage is a part of the game for me, not a four letter word. So I’m going to continue to advocate for a scoring system that places at least some value on it.
While I think that the strategic element is important as far as motivation, training and recruiting (means activating the potential of the own server) is concerned, I doubt that it ever was intended that servers buy guilds from other servers to improve their coverage.
Having the point of view of a German server there are hardly any German-speaking guilds outside of CET-time zone.I mean, I don’t know whether it was intended that servers can buy guilds, but it’s not exactly against the rules. And I think my comment applies to recruitment and community-building in general, not just buying guilds.
What kind of sense does it have to recruit/buy a guild for a server, that for a big portion discusses tactics in a language they are very likely not able to understand.
German servers have a population that is for the biggest portion speaking German very good or is even a native speaker (or Austrian /cough). the most German natives live in the same CET time zone.
Of course the people could have discussions in English, but not everyone is that good in English or wants to use it in their freetime…and what would be the use of the DE-server anyway, if not make it easier to connect with people speaking your language and so make it easy to communicate with them?
If it’s true that most German speakers live in the CET time zone, then what does it matter if you recruit non-Germans for other time zones? You’re not going to be playing at the same time as them anyway, who cares if they don’t speak German?
When I was on SBI (US), we had a ton of Chinese and Korean players playing in the SEA time zones, many of whom spoke no English. No one cared, because there weren’t many English speakers playing at that time anyway.
This incentive might be there, but only during times where one or two server clearly dominates the other, which are times with low population so the incentive is minimal and no bigger factor than players stopping from frustation by being rolled over.
If you want to further reduce this incentive you can add an offset of 10% – 20% even if no one is around.
There’s a couple problems. 1) It’s still possible for even vastly outnumbered teams to do something useful in WvW (and they can often avoid getting rolled over). You don’t want to make their very presence potentially detrimental by inflating the enemy teams’ scores. And 2) perception is an issue. If a team thinks they’re going to be vastly outnumbered, and that by logging in they may inflate the enemy score, they’re less likely to log in at all, or hang around if they don’t see many teammates on initially. Even if enough people would have eventually logged on to put up a good fight. TL;DR: having any disincentive to play, even if it’s just for a small number of people, is problematic.
While I think that the strategic element is important as far as motivation, training and recruiting (means activating the potential of the own server) is concerned, I doubt that it ever was intended that servers buy guilds from other servers to improve their coverage.
Having the point of view of a German server there are hardly any German-speaking guilds outside of CET-time zone.
I mean, I don’t know whether it was intended that servers can buy guilds, but it’s not exactly against the rules. And I think my comment applies to recruitment and community-building in general, not just buying guilds.
I don’t see an issue there since each servers tick has the same weight. It’s the point of the scaling system that each player is valued equally.
The thing I see having a negative effect on morale and overall fun right now is doing well on an evening and see all of it gone when you get back from work the next day.
The problem is that WvW is not designed around each player having an equal value. The only reason objectives even have walls and gates is so that an outnumbered force has some advantages over a more populated force and can hold them off at least for some time. A 40-person guild may spend all evening holding and defending garrison and upgrading it to T3, only for 5 people with a golem to take it a few hours later after they log off (and no scoring system can change the fact that that will happen). I definitely agree that it’s not fun when you lose everything overnight, but a population weighting system wouldn’t fix that either, it would only prevent enemies from running up the score overnight.
Actually a weighting system doesn’t have to be linear, if the current system leans to far to one side and a linear system to far to the other there must be a feasible function in between. For the sake of simplicity I argue for a linear system but if you want to discuss math I’m up for it.
It doesn’t have to be linear, but even a linear weighting system is already rather complicated. The current system is simple: the more objectives you own, the most points you accrue. And when it comes from to a scoring system, simplicity is a good thing. I think anything more complicated than a linear weighting system would rule your idea out entirely.
The first thing I noticed with your system is that it’s completely incompatible with the current rating system, the second issue I see is that it doesn’t make a difference between let’s say 3800/3710/3610 and 10000/570/550. Your system greatly favours coverage and thus works even more than the current system towards excluding most of the players of a server to have an influence on the final result.
Indeed, the system doesn’t make a difference between those two, but that’s supposed to be the benefit of it. It means there’s no benefit to overstacking a time period. It greatly favors time zone coverage, yes, but since this is a 24/7 game mode I think that’s ok. I don’t see how that means that it excludes players from having an influence on the final result, you’d have to elaborate on that one.
success in WvW is also frankly a matter of effort, recruitment, and keeping up morale. Those WvW communities which do the best job at convincing their players to show up night after night (day after day) and play should be rewarded. Those communities which are more highly organized and manage to recruit populations during all time slots should be rewarded. This is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week match; an ultramarathon, not a sprint. Weighting the PPT score based on current population completely negates this second aspect of success in WvW, rendering community efforts to recruit players from various time slots and to increase player turnout during a given time slot useless.
ooOOoo real talk!
I agree with you in this. But there’s a fault in the logic. You’re making an assumption that all the players have the same goal: to highly organize a single server. And yet we see that doesn’t always hold true; from the players who enjoy the feel of “winning” by ktraining to the GvG/fights players who don’t care about server organization.
Specific servers in this game have been trying to recruit for specific timezones since launch. There have been some successes here and there, but for the most part servers are still trying to recruit for those timezones, even in T1 where JQ always has had weak NA. Where are the players for those timezones and why don’t they want to go there? I suggest that they don’t want to be recruited. Now I’m not saying that PPT should be weighted, only going to suggest that the current scoring system contributes to players deciding not to be recruited.
I think we’re on the same page. And yes, the current scoring system rewards players for stacking an off-hours time period, so they don’t have much incentive to be recruited. I also understand that “off-hours” players probably want to play with their friends/other people, so there’s an incentive to form “oceanic servers” and “SEA servers”. I get that. I think a scoring periods type system like what I described would alleviate this to an extent, because stacking a time period loses some of its potency, while still allowing “off-hours” players that want to play together to ensure they at least win their primetime scoring period.
As far as a lack of common goals, I’d argue the current scoring system is at fault for this too. PPT is supposed to be the common goal, but the currently unsatisfying/somewhat flawed implementation of it has rendered it a four letter word among many (especially the fights/GvG folks). I have a feeling a scoring periods implementation of PPT would be more satisfying and might renew the fights groups’ interest in the score.
There are still so many people in this thread advocating for a system where PPT is weighted/scaled based on the amount of population that is currently online as a potential fix to the effect that “nightcapping” has on scoring. This kind of solution is highly imperfect and has the potential to cause a lot of unintended consequences, and you really need to address them if you want your idea to be taken seriously.
First, it disincentivizes actually playing the game if you are on a currently-outnumbered team. If you are currently vastly outnumbered by a team that has a very strong “nighttime” presence (I’m well aware it’s not nighttime for everyone, hence the quotes), you know that they are going to accrue a bunch of PPT no matter what. If you still decide to play, even while outnumbered, you will add to the total population in the matchup, and thus give a greater weight/scale to the PPT the strong team accrues. If you want to limit the amount of PPT they gain, you are better off not playing at all so that it is weighted less. That way your server has an easier time making up the difference during its “primetime”.
Second, WvW is not designed to be fair or have balanced populations all the time. Yes, your team’s strategic, tactical, and straight combat skill should be a factor in how highly you score. But success in WvW is also frankly a matter of effort, recruitment, and keeping up morale. Those WvW communities which do the best job at convincing their players to show up night after night (day after day) and play should be rewarded. Those communities which are more highly organized and manage to recruit populations during all time slots should be rewarded. This is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week match; an ultramarathon, not a sprint. Weighting the PPT score based on current population completely negates this second aspect of success in WvW, rendering community efforts to recruit players from various time slots and to increase player turnout during a given time slot useless.
Third, a team’s time in WvW should not be more or less valuable to the score than another team’s just because they play at different timezones. A weighting system would mean teams that play “at night” are inherently less valuable to a matchup than those that play during “primetime” since they contribute less total PPT to the score for the same amount of time played. This has a significant negative effect on morale and just overall fun. As a competitive player, you want to feel that your time played is valuable to your team. With a weighting system, the value you add during your playtime is now largely out of your control, since it is dictated by the number of other players playing.
Ironically, it’s this third point where the current scoring system also fails. Unlike a population weighting system for PPT, where teams playing “at night” contribute less to the score than teams playing “at primetime”, the current system has the opposite problem. Right now, it’s possible for teams playing “at night” to rack up an outsized portion of their team’s total weekly score. This means that, effectively, teams playing during “primetime” contribute less to the total weekly score than teams playing “at night”; that their playtime has less value score-wise. And this has an effect on morale that we’ve all seen; everyone asking “why do you even care about PPT?” is basically echoing this sentiment, that the scoring system feels meaningless or that they don’t feel they make a valuable contribution to the score anyway, so why fuss over it.
The solution is not a population weighting system, which has the unique problems I identified in points one and two above, and in the case of point three (which it shares with the current scoring system) simply transfers the problem from one timezone to another. A proper solution is to find a way to value a team’s contributions in all timezones equally, while avoiding any unintended consequences.
The best solution I’ve seen that values playtime in all time zones equally is the some variation of the scoring periods idea, where a match is split up into several scoring periods per day, and winning the match is a matter of winning the most scoring periods. Because the PPT score is reset between scoring periods, winning the match cannot be accomplished just by having a highly populated team in any single scoring period. In the CDI thread about scoring changes we had almost a year ago, this was largely the consensus solution that seemed the most fair while retaining the best “unfair” aspects of WvW. I gave a detailed example of one variation of such a system here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Scoring-Discussion/page/4#post4474765
That said, there may be other solutions. But no matter what, if you’re going to continue to advocate for a population weighting solution, you need to address the three points I made above, because they are serious potential flaws.
They mentioned that they were looking into solutions after HoT.
Indeed. And if you want an idea of the direction they’re likely to go, see this CDI thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Scoring-Discussion/first
Specifically this post by John Corpening:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Scoring-Discussion/page/5#post4477498
Hey Guys,
So from reading through the posts by far the most common proposal is to create some sort of scoring periods. There are multiple different approaches that have been presented but it’s clear that winning scoring periods and tallying up those wins to determine who wins the match is generally accepted as a good way to improve scoring.
Several people suggested keeping the map state across scoring periods so that the investment you make in upgrades and effort you take in conquering objectives but the scores will have far less of a chance of running away when the victory points come from the scoring period not the PPT.
[…]
Thanks for taking the time to engage in this discussion!
John
Scoring periods are essentially a way of enforcing a cap on the total amount of points a server can possibly accumulate over a given time period. If you split a week into, say, 56 time periods that are each 3 hours long, this means that each of these time periods has the same value to the total weekly match. This is opposed to the current situation, where it is possible for a server with a strong “night” presence to accrue a highly skewed amount of their weekly points from just a few time periods. Essentially this treats all time periods the same by allowing each time period to contribute equally to the weekly match.
I gave an example of such a system in that thread here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Scoring-Discussion/page/4#post4474765
FYI, this is much better than dynamically weighting the score based on the total amount of population that is on. It’s natural for population to ebb and flow in WvW, it’s not like sPvP. You want a system that will treat all populations fairly, regardless of which time they play. In addition, such systems may incentivize players who are currently outnumbered to simply log off, knowing that by remaining in the game they are increasing the total population weight of the PPT score of their dominating opponent.
Fantastic news and a great decision, thanks Colin.
Drarnor pretty much hit the nail on the head. Staff eles can deal with projectile hate fairly easily through lava font, meteor shower, basically any of the non-auto attack skills on staff. Engis really should slot some kind of melee option (tool kit, flamethrower, bomb kit) and if you really hate all of those, then wait for Scrapper so you can have a hammer. Tool kit auto attack hits like a truck on power engi, btw.
The projectile hate they’re creating is necessary for WvW, where melee weapons are currently struggling quite a bit.
He never said anything about whether the scoring system in WvW is “fair” or not. All he said is that competition in WvW isn’t fair, and linked to a dev blog post explaining that it was never designed to be (I think most of us in this thread understand and even like this aspect of WvW). He then stated that pure PPT scoring, what we have now, is a good fit for completely fair competition design like sPvP, and a not-so-good fit for “unfair” WvW (that was the only claim he made).
Chaba’s analogy of how “nightcapping” in WvW is like losing a player due to a disconnect in sPvP works perfectly at highlighting a flaw of pure PPT when applied to WvW scoring. Of course it isn’t a perfect analogy because there are buffers in WvW — gates and walls, siege, larger maps — that allow an outmanned team to survive and generate points from objectives they own longer than they would in sPvP. But in the kind of nightcapping people complain about (such as being outnumbered 30 to 2 on a map), those buffers don’t tend to last very long.
That’s all fine and dandy but that doesn’t mean we should replace the current system with a worse one, that is bias and segregating bt having different score systems for different hours of the day.
The problrm, as I see it, is that you two are repeatedly arguing against those who disagree with you, instead of offering good suggestion to find something to either solve your perceived issue, that does not treat various players differently based on their life and when it allows them playtime.
Uh, I’ve already agreed with you previously in the thread that a proper solution shouldn’t treat players differently based on when they play. And I offered an example of a proper solution too. Did you miss my post? Here it is:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/WVW-Man-Power-Balance/page/2#post5548935
The problem is that your idea involves the handicap for scoring to change dynamically. So if two servers X and Y are facing a server Z that has a strong night presence, rather than playing, they are better off not playing…
Sadly, that already happens under the current system. The quicker a server with the stronger presence can be allowed to PPT and gain Glicko rating by players on the other two servers not playing, the faster that server will be out of the weaker servers’ hair.
True, though that is in the rarer case where one server is utterly dominating a match due to population differences and should probably be fighting in a higher tier. My critique of Dawdler’s method is that it would also encourage a team to not play at those times during the week when they are significantly outnumbered, even if they are in an even match according to weekly total PPT. And these temporary times during the week of being significantly outnumbered are a very common occurrence in all matchups.
Tell me how not getting any points is going to make a server that’s behind in PPT gain anything?
The problem is that your idea involves the handicap for scoring to change dynamically. So if two servers X and Y are facing a server Z that has a strong night presence, rather than playing (in which they risk total WvW population being high enough for server Z’s nighttime dominance to translate into a lot of PPT), they are better off not playing, meaning total WvW population is low enough that server Z’s PPT accrued gets reduced by a ton because of the handicap. Then they can play more when they know they won’t be outnumbered and have a better shot of getting more PPT.
TL;DR: A handicap like what you’re suggesting means that anyone playing on a currently-outnumbered team means they are secretly helping the most currently-populated team by increasing total WvW match population (and thus the weight assigned to the most currently-populated team’s PPT).
Interesting how they very specifically stated that WvW isn’t intended to be FAIR, and you use that as your argument to incorrectly claim the scoring system needs to be changed, because you do not think it is “fair”
This just proved your reasoning for your own argument to be pointless, because you stated, and provided an official statement proving it is working as intended.
He never said anything about whether the scoring system in WvW is “fair” or not. All he said is that competition in WvW isn’t fair, and linked to a dev blog post explaining that it was never designed to be (I think most of us in this thread understand and even like this aspect of WvW). He then stated that pure PPT scoring, what we have now, is a good fit for completely fair competition design like sPvP, and a not-so-good fit for “unfair” WvW (that was the only claim he made).
Chaba’s analogy of how “nightcapping” in WvW is like losing a player due to a disconnect in sPvP works perfectly at highlighting a flaw of pure PPT when applied to WvW scoring. Of course it isn’t a perfect analogy because there are buffers in WvW — gates and walls, siege, larger maps — that allow an outmanned team to survive and generate points from objectives they own longer than they would in sPvP. But in the kind of nightcapping people complain about (such as being outnumbered 30 to 2 on a map), those buffers don’t tend to last very long.
The answer to that is when a certain player count is reached, WvW goes into “nighttime mode” with lower ppt. This mode would be updated every hour (dont want it to swing back and forth).
That is a very bad suggestion. It is unreasonable to change the rules at various times. You have to keep the same scoring system at all times. This game mode is a 24/7/365 game mode, not one designed or intended to work around your, or anyone else’s schedule.
Any suggestion that offers a bias segregation is terrible.
This. Not only is it unreasonable to change the rules at various times, it’s also highly gameable/exploitable. What would stop servers who are behind on PPT from simply ceasing to play en masse in order to force the match into “nighttime” mode? All of these suggestions about changing PPT based on WvW population or implementing a handicap are subject to this kind of exploitation. Most importantly, they’re systems that in certain situations would reward players for NOT playing. Anet is never going to implement something that has the potential to engender that kind of player behavior.
Seriously, we’ve been back and forth about this with the devs since the game released. The most fair and non-exploitable fix to the scoring issues that we’ve come up with is to slice the match into scoring periods, so that the total amount of potential points a server can accrue during one time block is no more than any other time block (i.e., scores from 5pm to 9pm PST are worth the same amount to the match as scores from 1am to 5am PST).
I wrote up a detailed example of one implementation of this kind of system last time this topic came up in the WvW Scoring CDI discussion, you can look at it here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Scoring-Discussion/page/4#post4474765
If you want an idea of the direction Anet is likely to go with fixing this issue, look at this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Scoring-Discussion/first
Likely it will involve some kind of time-sliced scoring, where PPT (but not the map/objectives itself) would reset every X hours, and servers are allocated a certain number of points for placing in 1st, 2nd, 3rd in PPT in each time segment.
For example, every 3 hours they could tally up total PPT accumulated by each server during that time period, and assign the server in first place 5 points, second 3 points, third 2 points (obviously the numbers could be different) toward the total weeklong match score. Then PPT would reset for the next 3 hour cycle, but the maps and all currently owned objectives and upgrades would stay the same.
A result of this is that “nighttime” players still matter a lot, but because they can’t drastically run up the weekly score their time segments are not more valuable points-wise than “primetime” players’ time segments.
This is better than, say, a system that weights PPT based on the amount of population online, because it is less vulnerable to exploitation and doesn’t disincentivise playing (servers that know they’ll be outnumbered could just log off to limit their opponent’s PPT).
Definitely agree that archers still feel useless. Also agree that the treb should not auto-repair. I think breaking channel on interrupt only is fine though, the treb removing stab stacks handled that issue.
WvW is a balance between those that want fights and those who do not. Whether fight guilds use a server TS or not doesn’t really matter; they still play an active role in assisting the server by wiping the enemy zerg so players like you – who prefer to ppt, which is perfectly okay – can freely cap.
Signed, a GvGer in T2 <3
Both of those are extremes:
1. we only consume the fights
2. we will sit on siege until the enemy is in, then waypoint away to not feed them bags and not give them fight, so they will log out boredThere is a third category, what I would consider as being normal RvR play: those who enjoy taking and defending objectives WHILE FIGTHTING in both of those.
This. There’s way too much binary thinking in this thread. I love fights, love the hell out of them. But fighting in an open field over nothing gets boring to me really quick. I like fighting over objectives, either to take them or defend them.
Sometimes, because of excessive arrow carts or the nature of trebbing from long distance or some other gimmick, siegeing an objective gets boring. I get it. This is an area I think Anet needs to work on (making siegeing and defending against a siege more predictably fun). But I still love a good siege. My favorite WvW moments of all time have been long, crazy back and forth keep sieges between two competent teams. That doesn’t make me a filthy PPT’er.
Transfers to lower populated servers should be free.
This sounds great, but in practice people treat “free” way different than they treat “cheap”. Remember one of the WvW seasons (2nd season I think?) when they made a few servers free to transfer to right before, and a few others cheap to transfer to? The free ones were bandwagoned like crazy; the cheap ones not so much. There has to be some kind of barrier to prevent mass bandwagoning, rinse, repeat to the next free server. A cheap (but not free) gem barrier for low pop servers solves this.
PPK will lead to less fights. And if there is anything this game doesn’t need, is more PvDoor.
This. There are so many potential unintended bad consequences of PPK. For those in favor of making it constitute a greater % of total points (or even all points, as some here seem to be in favor of) I would ask: How would you implement it so that it isn’t gamed? How would you deal with the fact that it heavily discourages outnumbered fighting? What about the hate for uplevels in WvW, already bad because of their rallybot reputation, which would only grow worse when they give free points to enemy teams?
The Long Siege and Player Interest
in WvW Desert Borderlands Stress Test
Posted by: BrickFurious.7169
I feel like a lot of this could be remedied if Anet prevented damage from going through gates (with the exception of special skills like the ram skill that is supposed to go through gates). You’d eliminate gate trebs and the ability for defenders to aoe/disable rams through the gate, which would make the newly designed killbox areas around gates in the new map a lot more relevant and less overpowered. Ramming a gate should be more risky than cata/trebbing, of course, but it should still be possible if you want to make long sieges interesting.
Please listen to the WvW comunity
in WvW Desert Borderlands Stress Test
Posted by: BrickFurious.7169
So the big question: Why are so many people invited to test, but so few are actually playing it?
At least for me, I spent a bunch of time learning the map (I think the map is fantastic and I’ve been almost entirely a WvW player since launch). After I felt like I got a good feel for the map and enough impressions to give some feedback, there’s not much more reason to play it. It’s beta, none of my progress is saved, things will change, etc. If they had hosted an event again they probably would have got more people testing. Also the bugs at the beginning that made it difficult for people to launch the test client probably turned a lot of people away from testing.
September 8-10 stress test - my feedback!
in WvW Desert Borderlands Stress Test
Posted by: BrickFurious.7169
Adding my feedback here to try and not create too much clutter (plus I agree with a lot of Menaka’s feedback).
What I liked
- The map. It’s amazing. Caters a lot to roamers and havoc groups, it’s a beautiful map, and I think it’s very cleverly organized. Also I love the verticality. You will get a lot of grief about it early on, don’t let it dissuade you. The map definitely has a learning curve but it felt a lot less maze-like by the end of the test. I got to the point where I felt comfortable throwing up a tag and leading people around; still not quite sure about all the good siege spots, but that’ll come. It looks like a lot of thought went into creating many places from which to place catapults and trebuchets, kudos on that.
- In general, automatic upgrades (one complaint below). Such a good quality of life change.
- Most of the guild upgrades and the UI changes. Being able to click on an objective from anywhere on a map and claim it, choose guild upgrades, see its upgrades timers? Awesome, great job on this. Most of the guild upgrades felt super useful too and not overpowered; the chilling fog felt tuned just right, the charr car was fun and useful without being too useful, the emergency waypoints are awesome, the banners are a great idea though the numbers could use a bit of tweaking (as well as fixing the bugs Menaka mentioned), the watchtower upgrade is great.
- The oasis event. So fun, and not PvE AT ALL. It was a big free-for-all with the minor objective of collecting the orbs. Such a great thing to have every 3 hours. The amount of damage to enemy keeps by the skysplitter felt just right too, especially considering it only hits the gates.
What I felt could use some adjusting
- Auto-turrets. Gonna completely agree with Menaka here that this needs to be fixed/nerfed. They were way too powerful, both in terms of damage and CC, especially when combined with the guild upgrade to cannons/oil/mortars, the killboxes, the increased health on fortified gates, and the beefier guards.
- The guards. I had guard defense/offense maxed the whole time, they still took a little too long to spike down. I thought their damage was actually fine, but the fact that most of them also taunted/stunned on a short cooldown with little or no visual warning was supremely annoying. The amount of CC I was subjected to by NPCs in general was just nuts, and when guards had the 50% damage reduction guild upgrade turned on it was a nightmare.
- The lords: The earth keep lord actually felt great to me; you can avoid his shockwave by jumping over it, the rock walls he throws up are awesome and fit the theme of the keep well, and his damage is high but not too high. I actually managed to solo him near the end of the test. The fire keep lord also felt ok I think, though I only fought her once. When the fire turrets are turned on at the keep it was definitely more challenging, but if you were good about avoiding the red circles it was ok and felt rewarding.
The air keep lord though…where do I begin. I think the biggest problem is when the air turrets were turned on in the lord room. I don’t know if they’re always turned on, but they were whenever we fought the lord. And it was ridiculous. Like, a group of 6 of us almost got wiped with no defenders ridiculous. The range on them is crazy. We had to huddle into the small circle at the center of the room to avoid them because they reached so far. Which allowed the lord to just do his teleport attack and nearly kill us all. I think nerfing the range on those air turrets would go a long way toward making that encounter more enjoyable. Which brings me to…
- The air turrets in general. There needs to be some kind of warning before they go off, like they glow white or something a second before they blow. In the fire keep you have red circles to warn you. In the earth keep the whole point of the rock walls is that they are surprising, and they don’t do any damage so it’s fine. But the air turrets can be lethal and they have no warning of when they’ll fire. It was insanely annoying fighting around them. They should totally make things harder for attackers, but not so randomly hard.
- Yak-less upgrading. I posted this in another thread too. I love the automatic upgrades. But the mechanic where the timer keeps ticking down, and a successful yak escort just reduces the timer, felt very unrewarding to me, and seemed to diminish the importance of yaks (as well as all the yak guild upgrades and the invulnerable yaks tactic). I think a better system would be to make upgrades have two requirements: The timer, plus a certain amount of successful yaks (and remove the way that yaks reduce the timer). This makes yaks much more important and make them similar in function to how they work in WvW currently. Example: the first upgrade of a keep requires at least 20 minutes, as well as 8 yaks to successfully reach it. The next upgrade requires at least 40 minutes, as well as 16 yaks. Etc.
- You could see what guild upgrades had been slotted in the guild upgrade UI for enemy objectives. I think it’s fine that we can see the regular upgrade status, and obviously you can just walk up to a keep to see if it has the only-siege-damages-doors/cannons upgrades. But being able to know what tactics they had slotted and the cooldowns on them felt a bit overpowered, I feel like they should be able to surprise enemies with that information.
- The dragon banner might need to be toned down a bit. One guardian with it fought a group of 8 of us and nearly managed to kill us all while being super tanky.
That’s it for now, if I think of more feedback I’ll edit it in. Thanks for inviting me to the test, I hope you guys get a lot of useful information out of it.
The Long Siege and Player Interest
in WvW Desert Borderlands Stress Test
Posted by: BrickFurious.7169
In addition to increasing the time to fortify, has there been any consideration of requiring a certain amount of yaks to reach an objective in order for it to upgrade?
Looking at the current upgrade timers, they felt pretty fine actually in my opinion if you didn’t count the fact that yaks reduced the timers. The yaks were what seemed to make objectives upgrade way too fast. They also made it hard as an attacker to gauge how long I had to take an objective before it upgraded.
What about, instead of yaks reducing the timers, each objective simply required a certain amount of yaks to successfully reach it, plus the time on the timer, in order to upgrade? This would also make the “invulnerable yaks” tactivate a lot more meaningful as it would guarantee progress toward an upgrade (right now that guild upgrade feels a little underwhelming compared to the others), in addition to making escorting yaks feel a little more important.
I Have found a fix 200% work!!!! Right click on shortcut —- > Properties —-> use compatibility mode for windows 7
Yep, this worked for me, and I’m running Windows 7. Very weird.
Yeah with auto-turrets active, plus cannons and oil that can only be damaged by siege, gates seem nearly impossible to take. It’s not even just the damage of the auto-turrets, it seems like they have a really frequent knockback too. At the air keep, combined with the air turrets there, 10 of us were having trouble sieging it with only a single enemy defending.
Can confirm, windowed seems to work fine, fullscreen crashes it.