Guild Wars 2

Tyler Bearce.3427:

1) Give players/guilds that are too big for their ‘Full’ status world an opportunity to move to new worlds, enabling them to grow more easily again.

1) Guilds don’t really move to empty servers to grow. For example, the OCX guild LATE transferred from FA to ET (BG) because they wanted/needed to tap into the recruitment pool there.

Heimlich.3065:

This looks like a solution in search of a problem.

QFT

LOL

Let’s go back to the days when PvP players couldn’t get the materials for making legendary weapons or obtain the half a dozen other stuff that could only be gotten from playing PvE. If you’re a PvP player, you’re really into PvE.

morrolan.9608:

Straegen.2938:

We don’t know how difficult the linking process is nor do we know what analytics they are tracking.

From what Tyler has said, mainly on reddit, the 3 months is purely to allow glicko for the linked worlds to settle. My argument would be is it really necessary to do that? Glicko is not measured for the low ranked world so linkages can’t be defined by glicko. And in terms of keeping the mode fresh it might be better to have more volatile glicko to keep more variety in matchups.

I don’t think Glicko should be allowed to settle. Already statements were made here about people leaving T4 because that tier appears to be locked and getting stale.

thenail.9082:

The next step is clearly to research the most useless food and buy as much of it as possible so as to drive up prices. The name of this whole game is profit… right?

Already been done.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/12649
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/12597

Hey, remember bunker meta?

CrimeMaker.8612:

All the west coast players who are complaining… you guys literally have no reason to kittening complain even if the reset is 5pm PST or 6 pm pst you guys will still have the whole night to play where as east coast people do not.

You assume all West Coast players log in at 5/6pm Pacific so therefore we must have all night. Please stop. Most of us can’t do that. A lot of us are just getting out of work or ending college classes or eating dinner, something most EST players have a chance to do with a 8/9pm EST reset.

Oh, got a dev response on this subject: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Division-placement-effect-on-TIER-rewards/first#post6161256

“Hidden mechanic”. Chests are auto-consumed.

Evan Lesh.3295:

There is a hidden mechanic that after switching maps, the game auto-consumes bouncy chests down to 4 remaining. It’s a confusing oversight as the normal procedure is to finish a match and leave the map before opening all the boxes. The items and currencies are in your inventory and wallet.

OK thank you!

Did you happen to exit the match before opening rewards? That’s what I did and didn’t get the amber rewards. On my other account I opened them right away and got the amber stuff.

All US people,

Petition your representative to support the removal of that bane of modern civilization: daylight savings time. It is a highly dangerous practice that needs to be stopped. Sleep deprivation is a real problem.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/03/time-to-kill-daylight-saving/387175/

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

What did SG do to remove the incentive of one team from logging out to artificially force the other team into extremely limited numbers?

That was a really old game, like early 2000s. People at those time don’t have this cowardly idea of trying game the system. They play the game as it should be.

Then I can’t see that working here. Not when history has shown wide cooperation to the extent that communities were able to get more players onto their server by logging out en masse.

What did SG do to remove the incentive of one team from logging out to artificially force the other team into extremely limited numbers?

TorquedSoul.8097:

Chaba.5410:

TorquedSoul.8097:

some teams will be starting a skirmish with a scoring advantage. So in a following skirmish where the teams have equal numbers, some of the teams will be fighting an uphill battle.

Eh. I don’t see this as something of a negative against the skirmish system since that advantage already exists in the current system. I.e. it isn’t something that is going to be introduced by the skirmish system.

I agree, the skirmish system doesn’t introduce any new problems related to scoring imbalances.

Except these skirmish changes were specifically labelled a fix to the population based scoring problems imbalances … clearly they aren’t.

So what anet is doing is implementing a rather complicated change which they admit will take a large effort to accomplish that doesn’t really fix anything.

The only part that would even remotely attempt to correct the scoring problem is listed as optional and would upset a sizable chunk of the players.

I was under the impression they said the skirmish system will reduce run-away scores due to population differences. Keeping scores closer make players feel like they have more of a fighting chance. Coverage still will matter, which was also said.

jason.9548:

This is why smaller severs and guilds should get less say in things.

TIME larger guild than Kazo.

TorquedSoul.8097:

some teams will be starting a skirmish with a scoring advantage. So in a following skirmish where the teams have equal numbers, some of the teams will be fighting an uphill battle.

Eh. I don’t see this as something of a negative against the skirmish system since that advantage already exists in the current system. I.e. it isn’t something that is going to be introduced by the skirmish system.

Evan Lesh.3295:

You get everything.

Are you sure this is working right? I got the tier reward shakey things after my first match on this account tonight but I didn’t open them right away. I left the match to spend time opening them. I got the emerald ones, but never saw the amber reward icons pop.

I logged into my alt and opened the icons right away. I got all the emerald and amber rewards. I’m sorry that I didn’t keep track of before/after gold amounts.

Sus.3610:

Guilds go to the lower ranked server to play with the higher tier server (b/c they can’t go to the higher tier server). This in and of itself could balance populations from top to bottom “IF” ANet somehow locks down transfers (though I don’t see this happening since transfers = $$$).

I don’t believe this. Do you? Guilds will move again so they can fight different guilds. Tyler’s message on Reddit said 4-6 matches for glicko to stabilize. I don’t think it should be allowed to stabilize, TBH.

/15 charrs were harmed in the making of this post.

I play for Server 1009.

BrotherBelial.3094:

other games I have the PvE numptys who have no clue how to play, how did they end up in Emerald already?

They grinded last season until they finally made it to Sapphire or Ruby without having to lose a tier.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Configs were wonky for the first 30 minutes of the season in case some people here played during that period.

So glad work today is preventing me from logging in and playing right meow.

Fox Reeveheart.1890:

3 of my teammates follow me, which is odd but fine, whatever.

Not “fine, whatever”. That right there should have clued you in to change your own plan immediately.

As for the AFKer, that sucks.

Rigante.2470:

And away we go.

I spit my coffee out when I read your post. TY based Rigante.

Josh XT.6053:

Aeolus.3615:

There should be guild pride in first place then server pride, but guild are just chat rooms with grind capabilities -_-#

Still by the other hand, why have guild pride if gw2 is not ment to be played by guild concept, just a gorup of players that can cnage chat room?

SO server pride is much of the same…another gw2 placebo like guilds.

RIP server pride lol….

Lets say you’re in a big building with a group of friends, the “guild” is your group of friends, the big building is the server. Why would you care about that big building? It has 500+ people that you may or may not know or like. You know you like your group of friends, but you’d like your group of friends if they decided to go to a different big building, but you’d probably still not know or like anyone else in that other building lol.

You walk into the front door every morning and see the same person smiling back at you and welcoming you. Eventually you develop a casual relationship with the person at the front desk even though they are not your immediate co-worker. Later your department is moved to another building and the front desk person there isn’t as personable. You move on in your career, but you still stop by the old building sometimes during lunch to say, “Hi, how ya’ doin’?”

This pride thing is not black and white. Relationships are multi-layered. Guilds come and go from servers. Guilds also disband and players move around. Not unlike a lot of other relationships. This whole argument about pride is a bit pointless imho since both sides of it are true.

Xenesis.6389:

while T4 is close to being stuck in a glicko hole of almost 200 points behind and leeching off themselves with no one wanting to transfer there.

And guilds are starting to leave T4. Remember, these were the middle-tier servers before server linking. Three months does seem like a long time.

Cecilia.5179:

Upgrades take forever to get going. It takes 60 Yak trips to upgrade a tower’s walls. That pretty much never happens for towers during prime time

IMHO upgrades should take forever during a prime/peak time. It means there is activity on the map. It means if you want that sucker to upgrade, you have to be skilled enough to do it. Most upgrades in this game occur during periods of low activity. It’s kind of dumb only because paper towers and keeps usually ends up in more fights, just how players fight over a paper SMC more than they do a T3 SMC.

Johje Holan.4607:

We need another tournament so BG can get 2v1’d again. The only way to deal with a stacked server is to 2v1 it. But the only incentive to do that is in a tournament.

What you need is some Star Wars RP.

Nate.3927:

You place them on downed enemies so that when their friends come to rez they get hurt.

Which is a different usage for marks than tagging downed players for loot. I use dagger or shroud for cleaving on downs.

fishball.7204:

For example let’s take your example of Maguuma, a heavy NA server. They might score substantially well in NA to be on even ground even against BG/TC in those 6 hours and be PPT competitive. But their 15 or so Australians who play will NOT have fun at all. They’ll just be blobbed down and spawn camped by superior numbers despite the scores being close. They’ll see it’s futile and just either go PvP or logoff instead.

That’s why the time-based action level doesn’t make sense. Only the population-based one. At worse, favoring a primetime with action level is going to make players stack that timezone even more, which isn’t what I think a lot of us want.

fishball.7204:

Anyway my point is, any scoring changes do not do anything to suddenly introduce coverage in specific timezones. All it does is discourage people to play due to activity levels and make for a boring matchup.

That’s fair, but a scoring system doesn’t do anything for coverage. That’s why you’re getting boring matches right now even with the current scoring system. Changing the scoring system isn’t a panacea for population balance. It is only meant to remove one of the reasons population gets unbalanced in the first place; players leaving because they are always outnumbered. Examples: IoJ getting pushed up into a tier their NA wasn’t competitive in until their NA leaves or Mag being pushed into a tier their SEA isn’t competitive in, etc. Even with such great OCX coverage, SoS kept losing NA and had a great difficulty trying to attract NA. JQ is going through the same issue right now. NA-heavy servers have the opposite difficulty, trying to attract OCX and SEA for the very same reasons. No one wants to be the first in. It’s very risky.

fishball.7204:

DB never dropped to T5, they hovered between 3 and 4 but that’s besides the point since their ‘offhours’ held their own regardless.

PvDoored, some might say. If only they transferred to T1, YB could have used some SEA at the time, no?

fishball.7204:

DB really isn’t a lower tier…

What a short memory you have. They went Full status and couldn’t get any OCX guilds in even though that was what they needed at the time because “some” pugs is not enough; Grimaldi posted on this forum about it then they all transferred off and DB fell to what, T5? Did NNK transfer off? Where did some T2 OCX guilds? Not T1. SoS is what tier right now? T1 material yea or nay?

Just because some guilds and players move around in an attempt to balance populations, not everyone does. Players aren’t going balance population that way. Anet can’t solve that completely due to the fairweather/hibergate effect. When we say stuff like “if only” x population would transfer to y server for the past three years… when do we stop repeating that and start taking asymmetric scoring seriously?

fishball.7204:

Why am I not surprised though, having an American tell me about what happens in OCX and SEA yep yep.

Maybe you should speak with SkyShroud. I’m sure he wants to hear more from you about how there’s no OCX or SEA in the lower tiers. Clearly these fabled pockets of players that didn’t want to move to T1 need to be transferred as soon as possible.

Boy, did this discussion get off track from scoring…

Bottom line: there are players who don’t want to move nor should they have to. They aren’t too heavily invested in any WvW guild to need to. They represent a server’s potential participants in WvW just as #hibergate players do. There isn’t any true population balancing that the current match/server system can support to realistically deal with these potential players (again look at Hibergate) which is why changing to an asymmetric scoring system is on the table in the first place.

fishball.7204:

I actually play both OCX and SEA Chaba and I’ve fought DB and been on SoS. DB has OCX pugs, not as many as SoS but they have some. SoS has SEA pugs (like those Garuda guys), CCTV etc but not as many as DB.

It’s nice you can read those PPT charts and think you know everything though Chaba.

Great! Then you know your personal experience cannot be extended to every OCX or SEA player. Saying a server has “some” pugs isn’t the same as being heavy with pugs in a particular timezone to the point that those pugs can continue on when a guild leaves. And were you not the one denying that there are pockets of OCX and SEA players in lower tiers? Where did these “some” OCX pugs on DB come from?

fishball.7204:

DB and SoS are both very pug heavy, same with JQ. That’s the great thing. I kinda forgot about SoS despite being from there before but my point still stands, night coverage servers like DB/SoS/JQ/BG belong together because as you say, there’s always activity for pugs and the like during our timezones so no pvdoor.

DB doesn’t have OCX pugs. They have SEA pugs. SoS doesn’t have SEA pugs, they have OCX pugs. Timezones are hard, I know. OCX and SEA are different timezones. You talk about a certain level of action, but these timezones come one after the other. SoS’s SEA timezone struggled, for example.

fishball.7204:

Chaba.5410:

fishball.7204:

they should just have JQ/DB/BG in 1 tier with all the OCX/SEA/NA

Only, there are pockets of OCX and SEA players who are not on those servers and already made the choice not to stack into T1 in the first place.

I’ve heard the rumors of these fabled OCX/SEA guilds in low tiers but honestly haven’t seen at all outside of LAG on IoJ. Unfortunately the low tiers were always dead in OCX and I highly doubt there’s some magical population that decided not to move up tiers.

Gonna be blunt too, what these ‘pockets’ of OCX/SEA are doing is not WvW. They are literally ‘nightcapping’ since they run into nothing on the maps most of the time. If anything they should be merged upwards so that they don’t get free caps with no resistance.

I wrote players, not guilds. There’s a big difference, to be blunt. Guilds provide organization (in addition to militia commanders). Players provide raw material for that organization. You named DB, which has had almost no OCX for most of the life of this game and you didn’t name SoS. What activity you see on DB is the result of guilds. What you see on SoS is the result of players. Take away DB’s OCX guilds and it is nothing in that timezone. Take away SoS’s OCX guilds and they still have players in that timezone with nascent guilds re-organizing them. Now you could argue that they are running into nothing on the maps (even though MOS shows otherwise), but then you’re starting to cross-over into “they should play how I say” territory. Sure, their existence is one of the sources of “night-capping” complaints, but then again how they wanted to play was their choice, just as it was of DB’s SEA guilds like NNK who have stuck forever on that server through almost all the tiers.

joneirikb.7506:

The more I read on this one, the more obvious it becomes that we have absolutely no idea how it works. Would it be possible to get some more info on how this is intended to work ?

Especially how do you plan to calculate the active population ? Is it just more than say 200 players online at the same time over all 3 servers ? Is it when 2-3 sides are roughly equal in numbers ? Is this a single map or all 4 map thing ?

How quickly will it change/react to changes in population ? If all servers have 100 players online, and one side is losing and deciding to log out say 90 players, how quickly would the system react this this ? (Regarding gaming the system).

As said before, remove the “set” x3 multiplier in prime-time, and you’ll likely lose 90% of the complaints in this thread, even if this entire suggested rule is optional and all that.

Previously I wrote that the map population-based action level seemed to calculate population disparity and why. As in, when teams are closer to equal size, the activity level/multiplier is high. The thought occurred to me last night that it must also include a threshold, a minimum number of players. Population disparity alone would create some odd scores.

Why would population disparity not quite work? Take for example two low tier servers. Assume that during OCX, they both have only 10 players running around all four maps. Since they are both teams of roughly equal size, they’d end up with high activity level and score high even though they may hardly ever run into each other, which would be absurd; just as absurd as a threshold alone would be (i.e., 100 players running around chasing 10 is not high action).

Since the intent of action level seems to be to mute the effect of population imbalance (where one team cannot exit WvW to force the multiplier to be low), it’s gotta be that population-based action level would be determined by a combination of team sizes and size difference. For example, action level would not be considered high unless all sides had at least 60 players in WvW. It would stay low if one side had 60 players and another had only 10.

Lastly, Tyler wrote on Reddit that they’d make it much more difficult to manipulate than the outmanned buff. I thought I read somewhere else that action level could not be changed in the middle of a skirmish.

fishball.7204:

they should just have JQ/DB/BG in 1 tier with all the OCX/SEA/NA

Only, there are pockets of OCX and SEA players who are not on those servers and already made the choice not to stack into T1 in the first place.

lil devils x.6071:

They specifically stated that they have to have the multiplier tied to time of day to keep players from logging out to affect the score not just based on the actual population of the map..

Yes they said that but how is that honestly supposed to work? Let’s say an NA heavy server faces an OCX heavy server. The NA heavy server has enough OCX that the activity level during OCX is kept high, at the 3x multiplier. The NA server always gets beat in OCX anyway for whatever reason. The multiplier though helps the OCX heavy server keep the score close. All the NA server has to do to win is lower the multiplier during OCX by logging out during OCX. The OCX heavy server cannot do the same during NA timezone because that timezone is going to be “blessed”.

Does that make it clearer how I say the time-based multiplier for action level seems more like a way to break potential tie conditions between two servers that end up balanced in score but not population? But it ends up rewarding the NA timezone which will result in NA players stacking NA Prime harder.

Josh XT.6053:

You should be using those skills to get tags BEFORE the players are down.

They probably are, but the people they are tagging are not dying for whatever reason.

mulzi.8273:

The T1 servers like TC…

And to think just a little over a month ago TC was a T2 server. What was supposed to happen?

EremiteAngel.9765:

The other tiers in NA looks great.
So close and exciting!
But T1…look at the huge difference in score.
2nd and 3rd place depends largely on who BG decides to side with =/

What huge difference in score?

Luna.9640:

Stop being so “Pro” for a while and try seeing the things from different point of view please.

It isn’t about being “so pro”. It is about difficulty in seeing your point of view because the majority of WvW players on both necro and staff guardian have directly experienced a vastly different view.

Silberfederling.9302:

I have finally seen every thing. A necro complaining about top few lootbags in wvw. You just blow my mind.

I’m more impressed at how long it took OP to notice that marks aren’t triggered by downed players.

Can we get something done about how close the participation pop-up and shakey chests are? Every time I go to click on a shakey chest, the pop-up gets in the way. Not unique to WvW.

Aeowia.7214:

Why would be that so called “prime time” treated differently, than the rest?!

Consider that NA players still outnumber OCX/SEA/EU players in total population across all NA datacenter servers. For the most part, all NA servers should experience activity level 3 during NA prime anyway, even the lower tier servers where only small pockets of OCX/SEA/EU are found. That said, I’m still not seeing a reason to set NA prime to max 3 level artificially. If activity level were implemented, it should only consider map population.

morrolan.9608:

Chaba.5410:

For map populations, he means it depends on how active the map is at any given time. I assume it means how big is the population disparity between servers during a skirmish since Tyler says “to prevent a winning team from trying to keep the score multiplier low by exiting WvW”. So we can say if the disparity is large, the action level is low (1x). One server may have 40 people while the other two have only 5. If the disparity is low, the action level is high (3x). All three servers in a match have relatively equal numbers. This seems to incentivize players into making teams of roughly equal size.

I assumed it meant total players across all 3 servers and all maps.

It could be.

“Depending upon activity level” wasn’t detailed. It seemed implied that if NA were set to max 3 activity level “to prevent a winning team from trying to keep the score multiplier low by exiting WvW”, then population-based activity level must be considered low if there is some large population disparity. That’s my reasoning anyway.

The time-based activity level though seems highly gameable. :p

mcarswell.3768:

Chaba.5410:

mcarswell.3768:

what if no-one played

How many points would tick by each server if only sentries killed yaks and guards killed sentries and river drake? xD Would anything even get upgraded?

i don’t think a sentry can kill a yak before it gets out of range and the sentry tethers back…can it?

I believe it happens sometimes; especially if harpies or bats add in. Could be wrong now though with the faster yaks on Alpine. Yak guards can kill sentries. They wouldn’t stay to cap the circle though. Maybe there really wouldn’t be any points.

mcarswell.3768:

what if no-one played

How many points would tick by each server if only sentries killed yaks and guards killed sentries and river drake? xD Would anything even get upgraded?