Guild Wars 2

Svarty.8019:

Asgaeroth.6427:

Any word on progress with this topic? How convoluted is your achievements database that it can’t handle some tweaks to a few values? Have you explored the option of moving the current broken WvW achieves to historical and releasing ones that work? What’s the real harm in that anyway, they’re as good as a gangrenous limb in their current state.

They’ve said before… it’s meant to take forever to get them.

That’s fine, iff
- there are many many intermediate steps that can be reached
- the titles do not take forever (your first pve title you earn after some
minutes, the only reachable wvw-title needed around a year of intensive play.)

KOPPER.1458:

“Anet should close a number of the borderlands depending on the size of the WvW population during off hours.”

how does that make sense?

Not my favored solution, but it makes sense as well:
It improves the correlation between “people playing” and “objectives available”.

Curently, in prime there are 0.7 objective-points per player and in the middle of off-time there are 20 objective-points per player. Closing parts of the maps, help to make it more balanced.

KOPPER.1458:

I don’t know what you mean by “destroy any remaining WW-competivity for a few gems immediate cash”

Look yourself: Match balance before anouncement (http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups/history/136) of league and match-balance after all the resulting WTJ-stacking transfers (http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups/history/162) (the few gems immediate cash)

Clearly EotM improved queue-tolerance and league-rewards are doing it’s part as well. (That’s why I think this league was one of the ugliest moves of ANet, destroy any remaining WW-competivity for a few gems immediate cash) But as usual, after the league people will complain about the cheap-rewards again, and be less tolerant against queue.

And even if not, a map-capacity of 50% will make more server competitive, as they can then fill all 4 maps instead of the current just 2.

KOPPER.1458:

Players and Guilds will always pile up on the top servers, there is almost no way to get them to not do so.

There is an very effective one: map-queue
Especially well organized WvW-raid guilds leave overstacked servers rather sooner than later, if queues hinder them to get all guild-members onto the map. Leaving just the trouble making WTJs that leave for greener fields after looses come in.

Therefore https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Proposal-decrease-the-player-cap-on-WvW-maps will work

Virtute.8251:

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

This is bad game design because:

(a) coverage is not under the player’s control

(b) a factor not under a player’s control gives a reward to the opponent (PPT)

(c ) there are no counters available to (a) and (b)

False.

(a ) “Coverage” is exclusively a player-driven mechanic, which can no more be removed than can the human need for clocks, time zones, and sleep.

(b ) Not everyone wins in competition.

(c ) It is addressed by human interaction through social networking.

The solution is simpler and more plausible.

(a) The moon drives the tides, but no one would say it controls it as control means you can change it. And a single player cannot change coverage.

(b) The problem is not that some are loosing, the problem is that much to often the result is clear before start, i.e. there is simply no competition.

If you are in a league where the first will always win and the last will always loose (most league seem to be like that, only 2:1 may be a way out) score and matches in every week n will be:

1) winner T1 5*n points
2-3) second T1 3n+2 points
2-3) winner T2 3n+2 points

4-6) looser T1 3n points
4-6) Second T2 3n points
4-6) Winner T3 3n points

7-8) Looser T2 3n-2 points
7-8) Second T3 3n-2 points
9) Looser T3 n points

So 2.) and 8.) are 4 points apart, the 8 can catches up by 2 wins in the last two rounds. As the 2.) will mostly get 3 points per round vs the 1.)
And if you are 2.) and loose the last 2 rounds you end as 8.)

Jski.6180:

@ Kraag Deadsoul.2789 non of that fixes night capping lol. What your suggesting only fixes karma training.

Is there a difference between current night-capping and karma-train?
Currently, who caps faster in off-time wins and the one with more people caps faster.
But if capping undefended stuff generates much less or even no points, things become different.

If it is a solution to night-capping strongly depends on the balance between the scores for different activity.

Another point of course is: Off-time is characterized by less people. Currently less people means higher score differences, but in an activity model it could mean: a few people can do less activities than many people. conquest is fast, and if you get your points just for being the last conqueror you can get many points, but if you are required to actively garrisoning and defending your possession to get points you get much less from it.

DeadlySynz.3471:

Do that and most of the coverage problems are solved (not all but most).

The main problem (at least in EU) of coverage is not that of time-zone’s but that of over/under-stacking. An over-stacked server has more coverage, simply because it has more people that want to play their amount of time per week. If queues hinder them to play prime they go to other times, and by that they generate coverage.

1) the amount of WvW-players need to be more fair distributed.

=> not more than X player may enter WvW for a server in a specific match, where X is computed from the total number of people (over all servers) that wanted to play in the last week divided by number of servers plus 10%.
If you were not able able to enter WvW due to this you can choose a free transfer to one of the servers with most free slots.

Kodaka.1960:

Any “activity”-adjusted PPT solution simply has too many loopholes.

2) Activity should generate points
Activity is not only
- attacking,
- fights and
- conquest,
activity is also:
- upgrading stuff,
- scouting (at least 1 person was inside every second of the whole tick) and
- defending (people where inside and/or attacked the attacker and won) stuff,
- escorting (a person was close all along the way and the dolyak reach target) and
- killing doylaks,
- killing/stomping players,
- opening walls/doors,
- closing walls doors,
- refreshing siege,
- getting (1st) bloodbuf
- denying (last) bloodbuf
- …
I cannot propose a good score-balance between these activities. I would need more data how often they occur currently. But ANet could measure them in nicely balance matches and correlate them to players currently active.

Especially scouting + defending are nice replacements for the “current score from tick”, but opposed to simply let the possessions tick, they require people being there.

I think the WvW-team suffers from bad project management.

We had now the 2nd Big-Bang project for WvW (Ruins and EotM), both consumed probably around 90% of the capacity of the WvW-team of the last year and both failed miserably. (EotM even distracted players from WvW in a period, where barely 6 out of 51 servers can muster enough people to play competitive matches in the coverage war.)

Do the quick-wins (small changes with big impact) first, don’t waste the resources in an attempt to develop something sensational, that no one wanted.

lioka qiao.8734:

You have no one to lead just like that. You won’t get experience that way.

I expect more that from that moment onwards, everyone is running in the zerg with commander lamp switched on, assuming that the system assigns exp to any commander in area, as there is hardly any other criterion to determine the “real” commander.

I cannot switch my lamp off, I need to level my commander will be a frequent sentence in that setting

But they are “actively looking for a way to combat this” since more than 8 month
https://forum-de.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Screenshotprotest-gegen-Griefing-im-WvW/page/7#post299637

Rough (Bing) translation of this 8month old post from the german community manager:
“Hi everyone,.
First of all I would like to thank everyone for your patience with you. Also – and above all – those who have manifested their opinion and their anger within the framework of the forum rules. Yes, I understand and accept that you are angry. Let’s talk but please still respectfully with each other.
Believe me when I say that – even if we have – been silent lately we this situation and the underlying problem have lost sight, nor ignore you and your feedback. We know the current situation (especially in Elona Reach) with regard to the grief plays in the WvW.
The WvW development team is currently working to revise certain structures within the WvWs, to rethink, to discourage players optionally and pointless to put siege weapons – without set stones for their style of play in the way to dedicated players and to keep them from playing on a world map.
Since this is a currently ongoing development process, we can call currently still no details about the exact scope of the changes. We’re currently investigating possibilities to find a solution that will work for all players equally.
The world against world was created to facilitate the participation of all types of players – and we want to exclude anyone of them to fight for his homeworld. Regardless of whether it involves daily player, occasional success Hunter or beginners who want to learn the basics yet.
In addition to the current development process, the WvW team deals with a number of other improvements, with the aim of continuing to strengthen the interplay in the WvW, and options for obstructive games to reduce. We have made still no immediate timeframe for these future development steps, want to let you know but already now that these topics the developers have arrived and are a constant part of discussions and considerations.
Thank you very much”

The only think that really happened since them was: They dropped the
- wall repair
- siege building
achievements and introduced the “siege per area”-limit.

Nick.6972:

Currently If I join an empty Bl and see 50 player enemy zerg, there’s absolutely nothing I can do to help my server.

Kill Dolyaks (but only cap camps if the scoring happens during the 5min recap buf, as otherwise it only generates dolyaks for your opponent to score), as each killed Dolyak gives your server a score point.

There are 6 camps on a BL, each spawns 2 dolyaks every 5min, so thats a total of 36 points to get every tick. More than a single keep.

And if your server has bloodlust on any BL: Stomp single opponents (1 score point per stomp as well)

And this really makes a difference! Look at http://www.gw2score.com/currentscore/hidden_points_percent/desc to see the influence of such score points (columns: score not from tick) best server in EU 39%, worst 21%, so e.g. last week Kodash made 38% of it’s score of 231983 pts, by dolyaks/stomps/sentries

Nick.6972:

Surely it’s not the best solution, but although almost everyone agrees that PPT system is flawed, no one ever suggest a good replacement.

That’s wrong, in the thread linked in my signature, I summarized a lot of (better working) proposals made in the forum.

Because acquisition and holding requires different amount of players and happens at different times.

E.g.: color the map with 100 people, then all but 1 scout log out of WvW (e.g. to roam on EotM) to score 10 times the objectives they control.

Shadowbane.7109:

Dayra.7405:

Shadowbane.7109:

But seriously why can’t people realise that there aren’t going to be big changes in the middle of a season.

You mean no such changes like the ones tomorrow?

Any big change that will affect WvW?

- radical changes of traits
- skill rebalance
- account wide WEXP
- critical damage change
- 2 sigils for 2h weapons, changed sigils/runes
- account bound legendaries and Ascended
- no more home-server cities to do a call-for-arms
Charackter changes affect WvW gameplay for sure.

Tornadoaustin.1496:

Having WvW as part of map completion was a dumb idea from the start.

I think it was a boring idea to include PvE maps into map-completion. I mean I’ve WvW-Maps complete on all my chars, but only 2 have total map-completion, all these boring PvE maps to complete, bah!

Shadowbane.7109:

But seriously why can’t people realise that there aren’t going to be big changes in the middle of a season.

You mean no such changes like the ones tomorrow?

They said 9 rounds, we are in round 3, still 6 more rounds to go.
Most of them for most servers completely irrelevant.
Ranks 2-8 will be completely decided in the last 2 rounds, every result before doesn’t matter et al.

It’s for sure that there are no longer enough people interested playing WvW to fill 24 NA + 27 EU server for 24/7 matches on 4 maps with the current map-limit.

So I agree that the amount of “slots” should be reduced to a more reasonable amount.
Options are
- less servers (or another organizational form that allows identification)
- less maps
- less match-time
- less slots per map
Probably best a combination of all of them, e.g.
2 leagues a 9 server in EU and NA
1st league 24/7 with map-cap reduced to 75% of current
2nd league with 8h only EB, 8h only the 3 BLs 8h with all 4 maps and map-cap reduced to 50% of current.

Such that we have a full-scale league and a small-scale league.

Probably best with only 9server in total, each playing in both leagues, and every player can play only in one of the two leagues every match (the one he enters first)

For that each player should be placed into server less and the new server should have different names (or if it is to difficult to choose new names! swap EU and NA names)

A blob is defined as any group of OPPOSING players that run over you
Mostly it’s claimed that it was larger than your group, but most often this is only a claim not a fact.

Johje Holan.4607:

2) Not a bad idea. But it might hurt small group ninjas too so it will be nixed.

3 points for a tower, 5 points for a keep, 7 points for SN, makes even sense to me that a keep must not fall to to less people, esp. not to small groups of hackers flying in.

I would find it funny if outter and inner wall can be separately conquered.
So keep 3 (SN 4) areas outer wall. Keeps 2 inner wall (SN, 3 i,.e. 1 per floor).
Such that reinforcement may have to break the already conquered outer wall.
But you have to conquer and keep the outer area to make Lord and inner walls vulnerable. (After attacker conquest outer will be wood, inner may be higher, if defender conquers outer back without loosing innerwalls, if come back to the same upgrade as inner wall.)

25 per side or 25 in total? (so does 12 vs 13 pop swords?)

Do NPCs (e.g. the door guards and wall ranger/mages) in fight count towards the 25 as well?

What’s the range? Do 12 vs 13 ranger doing a 1500yard shooting in a long shooting line pop swords?

Mighty Ice Arrow.9268:

Swiss Tournament = Winners play with winners.
EU gold, next week

SFR, Baruch Bay, Elona Reach (winners of this week matchup)
Deso, Kodash, VZ (2nd place)
JS, Riverside, Augury Rock (3rd place)

Why? Because they have win their matches,.

That’s wrong.

“The initial round of the tournament will match the worlds in each league according to their world rating. After that round has ended, worlds will be matched up according to how many points they have in the tournament. This will continue after each round, which means that the matchups are not predetermined but are dependent upon the results of the previous matchups. If two teams have the same number of points, the team with the higher world rating will be considered the higher seed for the purposes of the matchup.”
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/get-ready-for-wvw-spring-tournament-2014/

Therefore, EU-Gold Round 3 will be (order Green – Blue – Red):
T1: SFR (10pts) – Deso (8 pts, Glicko 5) -BB (8pts, Glicko 8 )
T2: Jade (6pts, Glicko 3) – Elona (6pts Glicko 6) – Kodash (6pts, Glicko 7)
T3: RS (4pts, Glicko 2) – Vizu (4pts, Glicko 4) – AR (2 pts)

WEXP happend during the last year.

Removal of culling is only slightly more than a year in WvW, less than a year in PvE

A lot of not WvW Living story.

Ascended items are new PvE-curse in WvW.
(incl. Legendaries which are now better than exotic)

and as said above the new EdgeofTheMist Pvp-Farming map.

Edit: and yeah I forgot, ruins in the Bl-lakes that may give your server score for stomping (but not for kills)

Aly Cat.9415:

Many of us have been on our servers since launch. Why should we be punished for bandwagoners?

Inconveniance for
a) winning due to bandwagoners
b) posting recruitment thread that attract the bandwagoners

Fluffball.8307:

Er, so almost all of T1, 2, and 3 won’t be able to play?

50% of them can play, the other 50% should move to T6-9 to be able to play or stay in queue of T1-3, if they prefer.

Rengaru.4730:

I don’t think BB taking the lead is that surprising, considering their heavy night caping zerg.

Especially when they’ve been teaming up with Kodash agaist RS since tuesday.

Unfortunately the outcome of the first 7 rounds of EU-Gold are totally irrelevant as long as no one wins vs SFR (or SFR let no one win, they are unreachable 1st after the 7th victory) and no one looses against Augury. The final ranking is purely determined in the last 2 rounds as 2nd and 8th will always be only 4pts apart. And the endresult will be
1.) SFR 45pts (5n)
2.) 2 server with 29 pts (3n+2)
4.) 3 server with 27 pts (3n)
7.) 2 server with 25 pts (3n-2)
9.) Augury with 9 pts. (n)

with n being the number of rounds played. Or turning it around: It only needs 2 rounds of swiss-system to order 9 servers in 3-way matches as 9 = 3^2.

The really funny consequence of this league of course is: It get started to be decided long after all achievement hunters are done in WvW and back to their PvE-Mobs.

Myth Shaia.4856:

20 years for Yakslapper title…

We can start a bet, what will be the chronological order of the following events:
- GW4 goes online
- GW2 shuts down
- Someone get the Yakslapper title (unpatched)
- The WvW-achievements get patches

They didn’t freeze it last time, and they did not this time.
https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/
had changes due to first round of the league.

And the only difference you may get in league is: you get matches in league that are out of randomization during non-league.

So you have to defend your score vs more variety. If you do there is no harm, if you fail (because your whole tier was overrated) than this is in fact an adequate adjustment. If your better (because your whole tier was underrated) you gain Glicko-score.

Let’s do some Math to force coverage by people to spread out on all servers more balanced:

ANet should measure
mean number of players in the matches and queues for every hour for NA and EU, i.e., sum up how many people play (on a WvW-map) and want to play (in queue for a WVW, but not on a WvW-map) at every hour in NA/EU over the week:
E.g.
…
at 3:00-4:00: 450 ppl
….
at 20:00-21:00 6000 ppl
…

Of course we have 4 maps, 3 BL and 1 EB, EB should have a slightly higher capacity than BL, so set: EB = 31%, BL = 23% (31+3*23=100)
NA has 24 server EU has 27 server. Goal is to ENFORCE an equal distribution of player.
so set for every hour max capacity of all maps to:

sum over all server(mean for that hour in the last week)/Nr of servers * 1.1
Give it a overstocking tolerance of 10% (*1.1). This would give on each server max capacity:
…
at 3:00-4:00: 450/24 *1.1 => 7 ppl on EB and 5ppl per borderland
….
at 20:00-21:00 6000/24 *1.1 => 85ppl on EB and 63 per borderland
…

If you are on a server that has more than 10% more than the mean of all servers, you end up in a queue quite often and have some motivation to transfer.
At the same time the map limit balance coverage issues and it cannot manipulated by any single server as it averages over all servers.

Transfer costs should be dropped, as they would only hinder balance. Matches are more balanced, as no team is allowed to field more than 10% more people than the mean of the league. Of course several (~half) servers will be below mean, but they more likely get people.

As a further improvement: Make 3 leagues
- large scale league
- guild-size league
- small-scale league
and compute the capacity per league.

nekretaal.6485:

The problem was that WvW players Were not getting achievement awards because the lifetime based permanant ones were unrealistic.

The solution was to add WvW daily achievement awards (3 of them, in addition to PvE one that can be completed in WvW), and to add short term bonus achievement points for seasons similar to living story.

WvW player still have much less achievements to get than PvE.

WvW got special achievements twice over a year, and PvE got them every second week over a year. Thats 2:26 in special achievements

Daily’s are more or less even now.

The amount of points and the number of intermediate steps in the WvW-achievements are still ridiculous small.
Why not a repetitive achievement (like scrapping) 5 pts every 5000 kills?
5pts every 200 dolyaks.

And yeah the titles like dolyak slapper are still not reachable.
GW2 will be shutdown before anyone will reach that.

Please do NOT discuss a single match that extensively! Always keep an eye on the whole league please! (This match even has a special match-thread: http://www.gw2wvw.net/topic/baruch-bay-riverside-kodash-gold-league)

Yeah, so next week matches

T1: SFR (10) – Winner of T2 (Open) (8) – Deso (8)
T2: Jade (6) – Winner T3 (Elona or Vizu) (6) – Second T2 (Open) (6)
T3: Looser T2 (Open) (4) – Second T3 (Elona or Vizu) (4) – Augury (2)

Maybe T2 is so close, because none want to win, but everyone want to be second

So my predictions
1) SFR
2-3) Second in T1 + Winner in T3 of last round
4-6) looser of T1 + second of T2 + winner of T3 of last round
7-8) looser of T2 + second of T3 of last round
9) Augury

As all the rounds between now and round 9 do not matter, can we please skip them and start last round next week?

Transfer costs based on TargetRank-SourceRank (currently within the league) would definitely make more sense then costs just on Target, such that you pay more if you transfer up (in the league), and (nearly) nothing if you transfer down.

But “removal of transfer costs” is a bad idea, it just leads to even more WTJ stacking.

+1 for 2 reasons: It helps (a small improvement now is better than a solution that never happen) on a lot of problem-area and it can be done within 1min.

Oh already 8 month ago, I though it was only 4

quickflash.6314:

/delete thread

Sounds like you are trying to make WvW casual and not competitive. War isn’t fair.

Maybe you did not noticed, but this is a game not war!
And my proposals usually try to make it somehow competitive, something which WvW isn’t currently. (Beside the competition in off-time recruitment: “Yeah we recruited more we are the best”)

But we can all stay at home if the winners are known after round 1.

9 round swiss-tournament with 6-9 server is non-sense in itself.

You need 5 round swiss-tournament to accurately order 50 players in pairwise matches

And last but not least, a competition based on who attracted most WTJ’s is not really better than the rest.

Virtute.8251:

Observer bias, again.

The fact you have illustrated is that Week 2 of Swiss Style is working as intended, as it has to, and as basic arithmetic would have revealed in any case.

My bias or your unwillingness to see the facts?

Last week “The most balance week possible” (http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups/history/160 and http://mos.millenium.org/na/matchups/history/160) had only 3 close matches as well and every other week will be less balanced than last.

This tournament is non-sense.

Virtute.8251:

Dayra.7405:

Any league is pointless with the current server-balance.

EU Gold with Gandara instead of SFR would probably be a quite interesting one, but as SFR wins everything without doubt, it’s as pointless as all other leagues.

Self-fulfilling prophecy …

Unfortunately it’s not a prophecy, but a current fact that:
- there is only 1 match with 1st and 3rd less than 10k apart
- there are only 2 other matches with 1st and 2nd less than 20k away
But
- there are 12 matches where 1st and 2nd are over 50k apart
- There 6 matches where 1st and 2nd are over 100k apart and
- 8 matches where 1st and 3nd are over 100k apart

13 out of 17 (14 non-EU-gold) matches are currently very imbalanced, such that the leagues are non-sense (and not will be non-sense due to my prophecy).

Any league is pointless with the current server-balance.

EU Gold with Gandara instead of SFR would probably be a quite interesting one, but as SFR wins everything without doubt, it’s as pointless as all other leagues.

For those that wana have the thrill of loosing gaining everything while they are sleeping of course a choice of 24/7 should be possible.

But all others that don’t want that should be able to play what they want.

To avoid alarm-clocks, here is my favored:

When you form an alliance you choose which time-slice(s) your alliance want to play.
- 1:00-7:00 UTC
- 7:00-13:00 UTC
- 13:00-19:00 UTC
- 19:00-1:00 UTC
Each time-slice has it’s own set of (7 day) matches and it’s own ranking.
For all time-slices your alliance choose you can play WvW, for all others only EotM.

An Alliance is any set of guilds that choose to build a team for the next week.
There will always be a few Random-Alliances, that are needed to pad matches to 3 for people not in an alliance.

Always better achievements are fine, rewards just based on achievements (not on rank) would not increase imbalance as the WTJ-movement for victory we have currently, but would increase motivation to be in WvW. Ok, it result in achievement farmer, but we are in PvP, any achievement-farmer is an objective for any kill-farmer

(Hehe I see a lot of funny threads appearing, don’t farm the farmer, code of conduct in the WvW-JPS, … )

And if you make the achievement unreachable for people on a server with much queue, even better …

Virtute.8251:

24 hours of 80 v 80 v 80 v 80

=/=

24 hours of 40 v 40 v 40 v 40

Next winky face, please!

4 sided matches? (and it’s not equal, but equally balanced)

if you have 10000 wvw-player you can make
- 3 servers 24/7 400 per side
or
- 6 server 24/7 200 per side
or
- 6 server 12/7 400 per side
or
…

Merge everything into 6 server, yes. (is btw. the same as making map capacity smaller, just that making the capacity smaller, also reduces zerg-size and by that skilllaags)

All servers need to have queue 24/7 to make matches balanced.

Shonie.5297:

I think it’s ridiculous that people still complain about imbalanced matchups…

There are ways to makes matches more balanced, just that they aren’t match-making improvements, but general balance improvements, just ANet does not follow them:
- make coverage/amount of player less important (by making matches shorter, e.g. weekend only and/or by changing the scoring functions, and/or ….)
- replace Server by anything that has a maximal amount of registered players per side (e.g. Guild Alliances), but an unlimited (dividable by 3) amount of sides you can join.
- make the map-capacity much smaller, such that low-pop server are able to fill them and high-pop server cannot play but have to distribute to play.

Yeah the all green – all blue – all red of EotM is very imbalanced during the league. (there where random variations in color during non-league).
The overstacked ligue winner have the most queue, will be most in EotM and are always green for this and the next 7 weeks.

This week the swiss system made it as imbalanced as possible:
- NA-T1/T2 varied due to only 2 tiers, EU-T1, NA-T3 (EU-T4), NA-T6 (EU-T7) server are green
- NA-T1/T2 varied due to only 2 tiers, EU-T2, NA-T4 (EU-T5), NA-T7 (EU-T8) servers are blue
- NA-T1/T2 varied due to only 2 tiers, EU-T3, NA-T5 (EU-T6), NA-T8 (EU-T9) servers are red

So no fun in EotM as well, for an always red server like ET.

No we do not need server mergers. In the light of mega-server for PvE, we need a replacement of the outdated and never very good server-concept.

And this replacement must not be red-green-blue as in EotM as this is lacking any identification, such that winning or loosing is meaningless, but something that has a strong identification!

The only thing in GW2 I see with a strong identification is Guilds, so I would only see Guild Alliane vs Guild Alliance vs Guild Alliance as the only possible future of WvW. The sooner the more likely WvW as has future.