Instead of having Server loyalty, have loyalty for your alliance or Globe and the community you play with.
What is the difference between a server of guilds/players and an alliance of guilds/players other than the obvious exclusion/elitism that would be encouraged by players being able to pick their own teammates?
The difference is that you can not control your server, or it’s overall cap. An alliance would have a limit much like a guild. This limit of players/guilds would be defined and well known. Based off the limit and the mechanics, the community can pick their own team mates and be matched against another competitive teams and players. The sense of Loyalty to ones community would greatly increase, The structure of our communities would become independent of the server or globe we are on. Having loyalty for your community overall, is better and more optimal than loyalty for a server in which you have little control over. Organizing a community that wants to be organized is better than organizing a community like a server with varying degrees of opinions and goals. How do you organize which that doesn’t want to be organized.
Overall, having globes or alliances, would help things like culture shock and mass transfers. It would provide the tools necessary for the communities to depict overall balance better and actually equate it to a number. It would give birth to more strategy and tactics and allow for guilds and communities to not be separated by the constant shift in server powers and locks determined by an equation no one knows about beyond the devs.
Guild Wars 2 is unique in a way. This game’s population greatly determines how well you do. Our population effects if we win or not. Yet if we lose, or drop out of tier it literally kills servers. It kills communities. There are so many things that can kill a server community and so many things out of our control, yet Arena Net wants us to balance ourselves.. But with what tools?
I can see it already. Grand Cross 2.0 and Titan Alliance 2.0. I’m sure people enjoyed fighting them back then. I remember when opposing alliances would be formed (AA, Bloody Flag Alliance) and would fail then half those guilds will just join the winning alliance, bloating it up further. You talk about a hypothetical alliance system having a cap, that will just encourage kicking. The alliance will just kick the guilds they think are the weakest links. What will happen to those guilds? My guess is they’ll quit the game, speeding up WvW’s decline.
WvW is designed as a sandbox environment for people to play however they want. Servers allow that. I allows those who want to organize to organize. It allows those who want to ppt to ppt. It allows those who want to blob to blob. It allows those who want to roam to roam. It allows those who want to have no interaction with their server to do so. It gives people the freedom to discriminate (which I suspect is the real reason why people want alliances) and it gives people the freedom to play in the face of discrimination. If you want to control who you play with, you already can. If you want to form a de facto alliance, you already can.
SMC upgrades too quickly. That’s the problem with this auto upgrade system. Unlike keeps/towers, SMC gets up to 6 sources of yaks. That’s too much. There’s rarely ever a matchup without a stronger server dominating the other two.
Instead of having Server loyalty, have loyalty for your alliance or Globe and the community you play with.
What is the difference between a server of guilds/players and an alliance of guilds/players other than the obvious exclusion/elitism that would be encouraged by players being able to pick their own teammates?
I wanted to address the idea of moving world linking to monthly instead of every 2 months, since it is being brought up more and more frequently.
The team isn’t opposed to this idea; we actually think it would be beneficial to move to monthly because it would allow us to iterate faster on how we are calculating which worlds should be linked. However, the main reason for not doing this right now is the matchmaking algorithm, Glicko. Each time we shuffle worlds via world linking it takes about 4 weeks’ worth of matches before Glicko begins to reliably match make those new worlds into balanced matches. If we did world linking monthly, Glicko would not be able to create balanced matchups.
Our next priority poll is going to be asking if players would rather have us work on adding rewards to skirmishes (and possibly other feedback items being collected from this thread) or replace Glicko matchmaking with a 1-up 1-down system (wherein the winner moves up a tier and the loser moves down a tier.) The 1-up 1-down system should work better with monthly linkings than Glicko, so we are most likely going to hold off on 1 month linkings until that system is in.
Another possibility we could pursue is 1 month linkings, but use the Glicko offset system to guarantee the matches. Alternatively, we could manually change Glicko ratings to what we believe they should be for each world. Either option would force worlds to start out closer to being in the correct tier and thus give better matches faster. These options are contentious, so even if everyone on the forums seemed to like this idea it would be something we would poll on.
How will you address the mass migration of players every time re-linking happens? Vabbi is a perfect example. It received a huge amount of transfers when it was linked with Deso and then FSP. Its increased population caused it to be linked with the lower ranked Gunnar’s Hold and then all those transfers cleared out and Gunnar’s Hold is basically not linked with any server right now.
I don’t know much about the EU servers but this link actually looks worse than the 4 linked US server. How the hell do they make these decisions? Again I say the lack of transparency really hurts them.
Anet hasn’t told us when they decided what the links would be. The decision was obviously made a while ago. FSP got mass transferred over the past 2-3 weeks.
I belive anyone have access to the pool but they only let people who spend time on WvW know about them… Unless you tell to all your pve friends to vote in a pool, I’m pretty sure only people who are actually playing a bit of WvW are seeing them.
Also you gotta keep in mind that the people who post in these forums are a vocal minority, which means that the opinions of the majority are not/may not be a reflect on what is posted here. The mail telling people about the pool is sent to anyone who is actively playing WvW, even to those who never come to these forums.
Every time a poll comes out, it gets the banner headline on reddit. Definitely a ton of pvers voting.
Q: Why do so many German worlds remain unlinked?
A: Most German worlds are around 70% of our target population capacity. If we were to link them they would be well over our target population capacity. This means that they would have long queues, and would be significantly larger than the other worlds.
->If anet would play on lower ranked german server, they would see that this is simply wrong. I am playing on Dzagonur and WE DONT HAVE THE SAME POPULATION like elona, kodash or riverside. this servers maybe have your 70% but on dzagonur we are every week outnumbered against vizu, against augury, against aurora, this week against elona. for example when we have 25 players, than our enemies have 50 players. when we have 40 our enemies have two 60-man-blobbs
Vizu defeat us before 2 weeks because we were outnumbered too, and this week they get two partners while we stay alone…
anet should understand that the lower ranked german servers dont have this numbers of players
why you dont link dzago&miller ; drakkar&abba ?
this pairs wouldn’t have too much population.
It’s not about Dzagonur having the same population as Kodash/Riverside etc. It’s about Dzagonur having enough population to not get linked. Abaddon’s and Miller’s have less population than Dzagonur and needed to be linked.
And anet already answered about linking dzag+miller and drakkar+abba. They clearly said that doing that would make one of them overstacked. Also, it wouldn’t work logistically because there are 6 tiers with 3 servers in each.
The whole point is that doing this essentially robs those of us who used to play WvW avidly but no longer do so. I’m rank 141 in WvW, but that means NOTHING as far as anet is concerned when it comes to getting a legendary.
Your wvw rank is NOT supposed to have anything to do with badges.
First thing’s first. Let’s get one thing clear. No one is transferring to guest servers to transfer to guest servers. Everybody that is transferring to Vabbi is doing so to transfer to Desolation. Everybody transferring to Underworld is doing so to transfer to Far Shiverpeaks. When servers get re-linked, these people are just going to transfer to whatever other guest server is paired with Deso/FSP. So why is it so cheap to transfer to guest servers? It’s encouraging bandwagonning and that’s exactly what happened in Deso.
Second, why is it cheaper to transfer to Deso (via Vabbi) than it is to transfer to Drakkar Lake (via Miller’s Sound) even though Miller’s Sound is in T5 and Vabbi is in T1? Doesn’t make sense.
Next, there’s no reason to lock servers that aren’t linked. I’m talking about Baruch Bay, Jade Sea, Riverside etc. Intentionally handicapping these servers while it’s possible to transfer to servers with higher population like Deso, Piken or Gandara is silly.
If I had to make a guess, its probably to get people to use Invulnerable fortifications more often to replace emergency waypoints as a tactivator option.
There’s no possible solution because it’s not something that’s supposed to be solved.
People play the way they want to play. People react to people playing a certain way in their own way. Those tags chose to group up. They didn’t have to. They could have ignored the blob completely or swapped maps.
Our primary motivation for avoiding running another tournament, is that at the end of every tournament we saw a permanent dip in the number of players playing WvW. Presumably this was due to players burning themselves out during the tournament.
Good reason to not implement the “Last Stand” mechanic. Will cause unnecessary drama and increase burnout.
I like everything except the action level and last stand thing. The skirmishes thing is a good step in addressing population imbalance and we should test that first before adding another layer onto it. The action level at this point just feels like a big slap in the face to anyone who doesn’t play during prime time.
Last stand I find to be pointless. If a server had a conceivable possibility to win, and cared enough about winning (most servers don’t), then they would do a final push anyway.
Linking T1/2 servers with T8/9 is not a good idea. There are vastly different play styles and it’s unfair to drop servers like Vabbi and Eredon Terrace into what is essentially a hostile environment. And right now there are too many german servers. Abaddon’s Mouth and Dzagonur should have been linked.
I would just link low tier servers with each other. Bottom 6 tiers in NA and bottom 6 tiers in EU to reduce the overall number of tiers in EU/NA by three.
The queues have nothing to do with the merges (does anyone honestly believe a T8 server has enough people to cause massive queues in T1 servers?). There’s just a surge in population because of the wvw changes. Even EU servers that didn’t get linked with any other server had queues on all 4 maps on reset. Queues will go once people get bored and go back to pve.
I find it hard to believe that some of these full servers that got linked are more populated than SFR, Piken or Kodash. You’re encouraging people to transfers to servers that were stacked enough to not get linked.
after several matches against bb it seems pretty clear to me that there are a lot of non-european but spanish-speaking ppl from all over the world that do most of the work for the bb server by hard nightcapping from 1 am to 6 am.
Nope. Wrong. Been on their ts. 99% of them are Spanish.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. If whatever guild/commander was leading on EB had instead tagged up on one of the bl’s, the queue would be for that map instead.
For some reason…I think you’re misunderstanding the Globe Concept & how it really impacts fighting.
I understood it just fine thanks. All I see is the exact same thing we have now, with an overemphasis on ppt and coverage and multiplying the number of maps by four (which would indefinitely lead to most maps being emptier than they are now), instead of facing the reality that most players play for the fights and could care less about the score.
If your answer to it is to allow switching between “globes” (I’m assuming the intent is for more variety?) then it won’t work because EU has plenty of variety right now.
To me, any successful WvW overhaul would need to shift the core focus of WvW from ppt/score to the aspect of WvW the majority of players enjoy the most: the combat. Objectives and siege are just mechanisms to get fights.
How does your proposal achieve this?
Anything else, no matter how good it is, will ultimately fail as ppt/score does not and cannot retain players. The past three years clearly show this. Additionally, Anet needs to fess up and close low pop servers. Server stacking happens because people want to join active servers. And having 24 NA and 27 EU “globes” each with 4 maps (totaling 204 maps) is just going to exacerbate this. Everybody is going to coalesce around less than a dozen “globes” in each region leaving everything else empty.
PPT as a concept is essentially dead since the new map came out and yet Anet seems to think people care enough about ppt to pay ridiculous amounts of gold for a guild upgrade.
Yeah I hate it when it pops up in the middle of a fight.
Please make it optional or at least allow us to click-to-dismiss instead of having to wait out the whole thing.
