Guild Wars 2

http://gw2wvw.org/?region=2&tier=2 is faster than MOS in recognizing the new matchups.

Sokre.5714:

Something is wrong with new system, looking at new table (https://d3b4yo2b5lbfy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/6f68004.png) Gunnar’s Hold shouldn’t be matched up against Baruch Bay and Augury Rock, yet GH got exactly them this reset.
Am i wrong?

The system is right, the table in ANet Blog is computed from a 1 month old rating.
Look at https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/matchups/Who-would-you-like-to-face-next-week/3367752 to see the actual probabilities.
Baruch Bay [SP] vs Gunnar’s Hold = 0.5% i.e. it can happen 1 in 200 games. You rolled very close to +1 and BB and AR both rolled close to -1.

azizul.8469:

Manu.6078:

Playing against the same two severs, week after week, is not a great idea. The players from top 3, both NA and EU, will die of boredom.

non-stacked servers that way—————>

It’s ANet method for better population balance
Stick together = matched together
Spread out = variance in matchups

200 pts difference between Gunnars and Baruch
not a likely result, but reasonable.

Don’t roll a +1 if you prefer easier challenges

Order and therefore color is determined by the random-modified rank. Obviously Vizu rolled higher than you.

Spread out a bit to other servers or have fun with each others.
Don’t remember the good old Vizu-SFR-Deso T1-thread anymore?

yeah the same for TC and SoR, 0% to play against each other, because either of them must take the 3rd spot in T1, but both in T1 is not possible.

Johje Holan.4607:

Ken is our best bet.

Anet’s spreadsheet they posted can’t be right. The percentages are all messed up.

It probably was correct once, but it is ages old as you can see on the order of servers.
If you look at EU-order and compare it to history I would say, it shows the probabilities of the ranking valid at the 15 November

As server rankings changed in the meantime probability did as well.

In EU there is greater variance in matches than in NA.

Why?

I think because language-specific server counter the trend for concentration.

So:

If you want more variance in match-ups: spread out to more servers!

If all concentrate on 3 servers, only these 3 servers can matched against each other.

The random-roll modification is only a temporary thing to have some variation in the match-making order. But your permanent rating is only modified by the outcome of matches.

Deviation you can see at https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/de/na/wvw
it’s between 150-170 so the current maximal modification of your rank by the random roll is approx. 86

So TC with a predicted rank of 1942 after this weeks match (http://mos.millenium.org/na/matchups) may get a modified match rank of
2028 (roll a +1) till 1856 (roll a -1)
2028 (roll a +1) is behind the unmodified SoR with 2051, but SoR rolls a dice as well.
if it is between -0.26 and +1 SoR stays 3rd and T1 match is BG – JQ – SoR
if it is -1 till -0.27 SoR ends on 4th behind the +1 rolling TC and T1 match would be BG-JQ-TC

The roll also influence the color you get in a match. Currently JQ and BG will always be in T1, but if JQ rolls -1 and SoR rolls +1 then JQ is red and SoR is blue (or green).
If JQ rolls +1 and BG rolls -1 then JQ is green and BG blue (or red).

Grav.3568:

Shorter matches is not the answer. Server population balance is.

But the only way of server population balance would be to enforce who is on which world, e.g. order all people by their WEXP, and then assign them to a world, best to last server 2nd to 2nd last, …. A thing most (including me) would not enjoy

As there is no way to balance WvW population, there is only the way to make population imbalance and it’s induced coverage less decisive. Which I think is a value in itself.

Matches that are not exclusively decided by coverage, but which outcome is at least influenced a bit by skill, would not be that bad, right?

I still like time-sliced matches most. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Night-protection-1/3281118
4 matches a 6h a day or 3 matches a 8h. The number of days such matches are running is secondary, be it 1 or 7 or …

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Matchmaking-Post-Season-1/3087056

Unfortunately, it is a feature of the GW2 engine that ANet likes to use in advertisements of the game. (great panorama view …)
You get it automatically if you have 3+ ultra-wide-screen monitors,
if you aren’t the owner of expensive hardware, you can emulate the effect using GW2 in window mode.

I complained 6 month ago about it’s probably unwanted effects in WvW: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/WvW-Suggestion-Restrict-view-angle-in-WvW/2158274
but the only reaction of ANet to it was to move the thread from the WvW-forum to the general suggestions forum.

It still exist, it still has bad effects especially in combination with ACs that do not have a LoS-requirement for targeting and ANet so far did not found it important enough to react.

All a matter of marketing and expectations Advertise your TS:

Bag-rain at quentin, be prepared, listen to the weather forecast at <address>
Battle-news, live reporter everywhere, follow us at <address>
Goooooooddddd Morrrrrninnnnng <Server>, <server> broadcast at <address>

If the people expect entertainment (and you do not fail to deliver entertainment in TS) they join you.

Watch “Good Morning Vietnam” and learn how to get or loose listeners

About a onto ago Devon wrote:
“The matchmaking post-season will be back to the system before, with some possible tweaks, but it will be essentially the same system.”
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Matchmaking-Post-Season-1/3087056

Now random-match-making is in place again, can we get an info, if and how tweaks of random-matches were made?

Would be helpful to adapt community support, e.g. Ken’s probability estimator for next matches https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/matchups/Who-would-you-like-to-face-next-week/3319267 to reality.

Thanks.

Jaxs.5830:

NA prime is really the least important period of the day in the current system.

Unfortunately this is the case, and in my view currently the major flaw of WvW.

Why is match-scoring designed in a way that
- makes it totally unimportant, how you play in prime-time (probably around 90% of all players)
- success only depend on “does my server have more off-time player than the opponents” (probably not even 10% of all the players)

Even if a general event based scoring is to susceptible to griefplay, a
bonus system may bring some nice effects:

The atacker get 5pts score-bonus for each wall/door/fortification/wp improvement it destroys by taking a fortification, i.e. up to 20 for a keep and SN, up to 15 for a tower,
BUT this is capped by the number of defenders qualifying for the defense event (I think you do if you repair a wall/door and if you kill an attacker), i.e. versus no defender you get nothing.

The defender get 1 bonus score point for a successful defense event per attacker qualifying for the attack-event (that are only a few, prior to the capture circle, I think only ramm/cata/treb/golem users that do enough damage to a door/wall qualify for that.).
Trebbing a fortification without taking it would generate a nice stream of points for the defender

Most guild never enter WvW, a lot of players have a private bank-guild, a lot guilds are inactive, i.e. are only filled by players that stopped playing GW2 a while ago
and you can enter WvW without being member of a guild.

I only see harm to people that start playing now (all worlds are far beyond your limit), but no effect for the balance of WvW.

I think it has a problem with the 3-sided matches:
2 small groups from 2 of the servers can agree to their common advantage of both of their servers and the third servers disadvantage to flip some towers on both sides of their border (e.g. ogre watch and durios) or even SN between them. If even a majority from both servers agree both can defend SN together against the third while 5 from each side flip the lord in 5min beat.

When EOTM goes live, WvW may become empty on most worlds.
A few competitive worlds play WvW. The rest goes to these worlds or for EOTM for fights.

Maybe it’s better to do something before WvW dies out on several worlds, than having to reannimate worlds afterwards.

Not before mid Jan. (next release-date is 21. jan. there will be none before) I would rate it to be part of the “well-tested” last part of living story.
So maybe mid or end Jan release, maybe feb or march.

But the public test is already running: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Edge-of-the-Mists-Testing-Update-Updated-12-5

I think it is scheduled to be in the public test together with EOTM.

When it is bug-free, it may be scheduled into a release.
Obviously this isn’t the case so far …
And till it is you will probably not hear from ANet about it again

I think it’s the 24/7 coverage requirement that causes most performance imbalance.
Time-sliced matches https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Night-protection-1/3281118 that allow less populated servers to focus on one of the smaller (8h per day instead of 24) time-sliced matches would help to restore competition a lot.

As long as we have to play Coverage-Wars, where quality during prime-time doesn’t matter compared to hours of PvD in off-time, size of WW-population is the decisive factor and concentration onto a few servers will continue.

Haltair.3062:

We are in vacations mates, V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N-S.

1 week vacation = drop of 3 ranks
All the achievements of 7 weeks league-efforts already gone within one post-league week, what a waste

PS: Your (and Jades and …) vacation ruined the “score not from tick” rate this week. Kodash only 32.40%, Elona only 28.93% …

EU prime (evening) is 6pm UTC till 11pm UTC afterwards you have EU-night.
Top 10 servers have queue on most borderlands from 6pm UTC till 9-10pm UTC. Afterwards WvW empties and night-shifts (20-100 people per server in EU-top10) take over (~11pm UTC till 5pm UTC when the morning shift join in.).
There are only 3 english-speaking servers in EU-top10: SFR, Piken, Deso. The rest is french (3 server), german (3 server) or spanish (1 server) speaking.

Wididyth.3847:

See you on friday ^^

After 3 weeks in a row with jade (present in night or absent in general)

hopefully not again

I want the classical T2 (4vs5vs6) match on friday! Please, dear dice give us a roll for:
Kodash vs Elona vs Riverside

Elona Reach vs Riverside vs Kodash of course

But
Elona-Vizu-Piken
SFR-Kodash-Riverside
would be cool as well

Snowreap.5174:

here are the estimated matchup probabilities for tomorrow.

-ken

Hi Ken,
Did you found some infos about the possible tweaks Devon has announced:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Matchmaking-Post-Season-1/3087056
or did you used the old parameter?

we slept during the season, now back to business

Phule.1968:

Everything is just so blue all the time, what’s so frikkin fun in smashing down doors in empty keeps/towers and killing npc’s for the umpht time all day and night?

PvD isn’t fun nor should it be as match decisive as it is now, but ANet so far doesn’t want to nerf it

I would be surprised. if our night-shift is stronger now than it was during the last 7 weeks, it just looks like the enemies that outnumbered them during the last weeks are gone now. So they can enjoy some karma-train this week, for the frustrating outnumbered defense they did during the season.

http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups
The higher in the rank the more active and successful in WvW.

There is definitely a strong rivalry between the german servers in EU. Relative Ranking between Elona, Kodash and Riverside is definite more important to each of them than absolute rank in EU, especially now that Elona lost the dominance it had for a year.

Toumai.4812:

After end of season 1, it’s difficult for JS (and other servers i guess) to have motivation for this mu … It’s like a training mu …

^^you exhausted yourself for these finishers? Funny

ptitminou.6489:

“ITS 2 AM EVERYONE GET OUT OF WVW TO MAKE SURE THEY CANT SCORE POINTS” and it is foolish to think that serious guilds wont do it. Only the pugs will remain in EBG. Everyone else will leave because good guilds play for the win."

The side with the objectives should stay, and if they do they get a point for any player they can motivate to stay.

But yes the goal is: 50 players should not be able to score 695 pts just by PvD, choosing a time where the enemy sleeps as their play-time, and by that dominating the effort of the 1200 people fighting at prime-time. Still they can turn the map to their color, giving them an advantage, still they score for their 50 people, still they can play the full game without any restriction, but this no longer dominates the match. And this is the intention of this proposal.

Only WvW-Newbies believe that wars are decided on the battlefield.

The real WvW-profi knows that the propaganda-warface in the forum decides matches.

I guess we don’t need that this week, beating Jade should be enough.

Btw. did you noticed this one
https://forum-de.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/matchups/WvWBild-News-Ticker/304339
about our match with FSP? (Bing-translate manage to produce understandable english) (You need to know that the German name of Elona is literally Elona Rock)

Only a real WvW-player is happy now, that he has it’s own Doylak to protect.

GrandMechantLoup.8201:

Krumbotor.9064:

To make my post more precise: I’m talking about 1:00 am to 6:00 am CET. That’s when most of your keeps and towers fall to the enemy who has overwhelming presence in WvW during the night. Gw2 is a game and it should be possible for normal people with normal schedules to have fun during normal times, to build something up. Who the kitten sits in front of the computer all night, to raid the enemy? And don’t come up with the “don’t play if you don’t like it or deal with it”, that’s just lame. I love guildwars, but I hate anet for limiting the games possibilities.

Only kids think that everybody go to bed at 1:00 AM CET. In real world some kittens work when you “normal people” are sit in front of your computer, some kittens don’t sleep, some kittens are unemployed/at home, some kittens are in vacation, some kittens are in other timezone.

Lol, did you really had to tap into this trap-question?

Night is when there are less than 350 people (sum up all sides) in a WvW-match.

Keep/Castle/Tower-Lords disappear and Ticker-score is shutdown, whenever there is that low interest in a match. Camp-capture, Stomping and Dolly kills still work and score as usual.

Note, that one side alone can “activate” the match by filling up ALL 4 maps, i.e. capacity per side is around 400, boykott doesn’t work.

No time for 1vs1, sorry. We have to make enough points on weekend, to stay ahead jade’s night-capping starting on monday…

GrandMechantLoup.8201:

Dayra.7405:

The dominance of off-time over prime-time has to be nerved for all times not only night, day as well.

The emptier a match the more important is coverage of that time for match-outcome.
This is a paradox with respect to all possible times.

What primetime? German primetime when the French were still eating? Spanish primetime when the German raidoff ? and Russians ? EU zone have to deal with cultural issues not only timezone. And everybody will be bored if we fight only our other national servers.

Lol, primetime is not a specific point or interval in the time of a specific timezone.

Prime-time of a match is the time where most people (of all sides) are in the match.
In upper tears this usually means: the time where all three sides have queue on all or at least most maps. This may be different time for different matches, and even different for different days of the same match.

To select a threshold:
Prime-time start when more than 1000 people are in the match.
Off-time starts when the number of people drops below 1000.
(assuming 4*3*100 = 1200, as the match-capacity.)

Anyhow, this should not be binary depending on a threshold, but dynamically based on the amount of people actually in the match.

Here is just another proposal how this can be done:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Night-protection-1/3326019

MiLkZz.4789:

@OP: You can’t punish people that play at night.

At least I do not want to punish them, BUT I want to end their dominance of match outcome.

Another possibility is to separate the 24h into different slices, that play separate matches:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Night-protection-1/3281118
3 matches running 8/7 over a week, (or 4 matches running 6/7). Then the night-player may fight for the night ranking of their server, the day players fight for the day-rank of their server and the evening players fight for the evening rank of their server.
Smaller server may compete with larger servers by focussing in one slice, larger servers will likely go to fight to win several slices.

The dominance of off-time over prime-time has to be nerved for all times not only night, day as well.

The emptier a match the more important is coverage of that time for match-outcome.
This is a paradox with respect to all possible times.

competition, yes, but not only competition for coverage.

Where coverage is so dominant that everything else is insignificant.

You may remember Devon Carver blog at june 5, on the Future of WvW:

“Right now our game rewards you for holding an objective, not necessarily for taking it, and overwhelmingly favors the last server to log out for the day. We have some ideas in the pipeline to try to increase scoring when people are playing the game and to make it much more difficult to keep your territory without actively guarding it.”
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/devon-carver-on-the-future-of-world-vs-world/

A pity that it was just another unaccomplished promisse.

Here another proposal to nerf the overly decisive effect of night-capping:

Garrision
====

The general requirement is: it needs X player (sum all sides) on a map to maximally score X points (per side) on that map. No player on a map no score.

On each map the total number of players (of all three sides) is tracked.
On each tick the mean (if you enter or leave map and are 7.5min on the map you count 0.5) no of people of all sides, that got or made damage to/from players/NPCs (not fauna) during that time (i.e. were not AFK the whole tick) is used as point-cap for each side of this map.
If each side has 100 ppl on the map you have a cap of 300, which is above any maps possible tick.

Things looks different in off-time. If no one is on a map no one can get a point there.
If there are 100-30-30 the cap would be 160 for each side.

A large zerg jumping between maps capturing everything isn’t any longer the best tactic I guess, it leaves no one on the captured maps to score points, and if it jumps to a map where only the enemies have objectives, it first boosts the enemy score from that map till the zerg captures as many points as he has members.

If only one side is active and controls objective 695:0:0 and fields 100 per map (I think the max is somewhere around this number) it scores 400:0:0pts per tick, so boycott does not bring you anywhere.

However if you control 695:0:0 and go to “bed after work” you stop scoring as well.

A side with more coverage and equal quality in prime will continue winning, however a side with high coverage, but low quality forces will have it harder.

Even if off-time most often will bring a lower score with this method than it does now, there is definitely no discrimination of off-time players. Every player active in WvW at any time worth 1 point scoring potential. You of course have to control objectives to turn this potential into score. In fact prime-time players are still a bit underrated as the max number of player is around 1200 player max object is only 695, i.e. they will never be able to reach their potential. So giving each player only 0.5 points scoring potential would be even more fair.

You may remember Devon Carver blog at june 5, on the Future of WvW:
“Right now our game rewards you for holding an objective, not necessarily for taking it, and overwhelmingly favors the last server to log out for the day. We have some ideas in the pipeline to try to increase scoring when people are playing the game and to make it much more difficult to keep your territory without actively guarding it.”
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/devon-carver-on-the-future-of-world-vs-world/

A pitty that never happen anything following these words. I think this proposal fits his words better than the current state.

Matching 1st vs 2nd vs 3rd is the most likely match in the random-matchmaker.
Be happy that we aren’t in the old tier system anymore, there it was the ensured match.

count the number of servers with strictly more points than you and see it’s 3 servers that are strictly better, so you are 4th, lol. Doesn’t matter if they are tied or not.
(same for olympics btw if there are 2 silver medals, there will be no bronze)

Theftwind.8976:

Arrow carts with their ability to hit anywhere in a tower if one manipulates his windowed screen size is another issue ANET chooses to ignore rather then address again one way or the other.

Lol yeah, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/WvW-Suggestion-Restrict-view-angle-in-WvW/2158274 is already 6month old. The only reaction of ANet was to move it from WvW-Forum to General Suggestion forum, such that it get out of sight of WvW players.

Gilgamesh.7364:

BG wasn’t always the #1 server…

We came together as a community in order to get to where we are at right now. Everyone has the chance to do the same thing, it’s all a matter of how bad your server wants it.

#Believegate2013

I think, it doesn’t matter who is No 1, if No 1 only means: now – native or transfered – at the server with the largest force in off-time.

Fight for a more meaningful system and get No 1 there!

Gilgamesh.7364:

I personally think it’s fine how it is

Not really surprising to hear that from a BG (-joiner?).

But I think it is bad game-design if periods of low-activity dominate periods of high-activity with respect to the outcome of a match. Is a bit like in the break of the soccer-match, the captains roll 7 dices (1 per night in the match), and add that much goals to their score

When you really dominate prime-time you may reach a mean-score of 300:200:200 over some hours. But that is already rare.

But if you dominate off-time (and you do not need skill, only some more people) you easily make a score of 500:100:100 over twice as many hours.

So it is totally irrelevant how good you are in high-activity times, just be there as long as possible.

And that’s why I think coverage-war is bad and needs to be nerfed to make WvW interesting again.

And there are many good ideas in the forum on how to do that. It just needs Anet to notice and accept their flaw. Unfortunately this always takes a while, convincing them that the first match-making system was broken and lead to frozen match-ups took around 6 month as well.

Edit: Ups, yes, thanks for pointing to this mistake

aspirine.6852:

That would require alot from the AI in the game. I doubt guards can even be as good as even the biggest noob in the game right now.

It hasn’t to be better than the biggest noob. It only has to be better than inactive.

But hehe in general it is very easy to make the computer shoot unbelievable good:
Target in range => you make a hit on it.
The hard part for game developers is to make computer bad enough such that humans can compete. But that isn’t so much a topic in tower-defense (only in shooter games).

The other hard part is target selection. But that isn’t that hard as well: give each type of weapon a priority-list (e.g. for AC: AC, ramms, golems, people (highest amount, highest overlap with other ACs), anything else, for trebs: omegas, treabs, catas), and then make a random selection between targets with same highest prio.

I did not took it as provocation, I took it as joke.

But, if you mean it serious: Have fun with your party alone in the night.