Guild Wars 2

benny.1796:

They removed the EXP rewards from all WvW contents. And thats exactly why ;-)

But now you get a lot of tomes from the reward tracks, so you can play on a L80 char and still level your new ones.

If anything I’d say levelling is faster now, just you don’t have to bring an underscaled character into an end-game zone to do it.

Scaling back the damage, or, maybe better, reducing the number you can deploy in an area probably would be a good thing.

We only had one week of active play in DBl and all I can do is repeat the discussion that has been going on here ad-nauseam – people’s experiences differed. We had a very interesting 10 days on the DBls before they were swapped out. I’m not an ABl hater, I’m very glad it’s in rotation, should have been from the start, but the DBls were not as you described here, at the end.

We had good fights that were won and lost for all 3 keeps, on the new, improved maps, when people had returned. I think there is just a lot more work to be done to understand the best strategies for the new maps, when everyone knows the ABls backwards. Personally I think that’s good, but it’s clear not all agree.

lil devils x.6071:

It doesn’t work like " think your way into a bunkered keep" at all. .

Well mostly I’d say it does work that way in EU. I get your point. There are some servers who try to siege up and retire. But except during the dead period after HoT they don’t tend to do THAT well. And if we increase ppk to be a major contributor to the score I hope there will be less of it. But, yeah, I get the concern and a beta period where we see what happens and can tweak would be good.

I just don’t agree with the pessimism of those who fear that increasing ppk will lead to less fights, because people will not want to die. Although I know that’s not your position, this feels a bit of a variant on it. I prefer to think that a higher percentage of the score from fights will make people want to get better at them and engage in them more. But maybe I’m hopelessly naive!

lil devils x.6071:

Siege is a part of the game. Let Siege vs siege , not Siege vs Player. The end result is why many left the game. We currently have map Queue zergs run into towers and all jump on siege against the 5 players outside now and refuse to fight. The guilds run around in the fields and fight to stay away from the ACs . That is what made everyone get bored and leave the game..

This allows for the use of siege, but make a choice. They can choose to zerg siege hump or they can choose to get off their kitten and fight like everyone else. IF you want bags, earn them.

I guess we will have to disagree on this one. I am more worried about the zergs that face-rub keeps, not giving a **** about siege.

Yes, it can be a pain trying to break into a well sieged keep but, as I said, a good offensive group should not be dying under it. It should just slow you down. People on siege should die just as much, if not more, to AOE from below. And, actually, trying to think your way into a bunkered keep is one of the more interesting challenges in the game.

lil devils x.6071:

Jong.5937:

…..anyway why are we still talking about all this, when it seems Anet are going ahead with Plan A regardless

Because if we stop talking about it, it will just take another 6 months for them to go back and try to fix it after they realize players left over it.

Didn’t you see my wink? It was more a nudge to Anet to actually engage more with the discussion they kindly started than a serious comment.

? I’ve seen no evidence that the DBls are easier to defend. Different for sure, in lots of ways. But easier to secure?

We only really had one week of the revised DBls, with restored population and a lot of people were still learning the maps, so it’s hard to say anything for sure, but before the update the DBls were a kaleidoscope of colours caused by karma trains. After the update, I’d say keeps were fought over, won and lost, similarly to the ABls, except the optimal siege locations (offensive and defensive) are less well understood. Northern towers flip more because they are more isolated and less strategic. Southern towers maybe are more often held by the offfense as they are further away from Garri (or at least feel it). So I wouldn’t say that the DBls would be an advantage for the defending team.

…..anyway why are we still talking about all this, when it seems Anet are going ahead with Plan A regardless

lil devils x.6071:

Dawdler.8521:

lil devils x.6071:

The mindset that should ever be a way to win is what is ruining the game mode and making the players not care about score because with their current scoring system and the one proposed here , to win still means you PvD and siege hump REAL good. That is no way to reward a large scale PvP game mode. PvP should not be an after thought in a PvP game mode, it should be the focus and the reward.

And with the PPK > all mindset it will only mean this:

1 – People will siege hump more, because that give safe kills
2 – People will PvD more, because facing players may mean a defeat and loss of points
3 – People will only engage when outnumbering the enemy at least 5 to 1
4 – If you are not 5 to 1 on enemies, goto 1

1) You do realize that if you re read through what I posted in this thread, siege humping would mean you do not get any ppk at all or loot, so how does it give safe kills? In what I suggested, it forces players to make hard choices, yes an AC can do more damage than their character, however, if they so much as touch that AC they get no loot from anyone that dies that they hit with it and they get no PPK to their score. You have to sacrifice your loot and score to use it.

2)Pvd = get no points at all.

3) Outnumber buff could be used to give more benefits to offset and is too weak as it is.

Not sure you understood what you were addressing.

I agree ppk should be a much bigger contributor, but I don’t agree with what you say about siege. Siege is a part of the game. Who are these selfless heroes that will man siege for no rewards? And face rubbing a blob against siege should carry a big penalty! Small well-organised groups have always been able to mitigate siege damage while they bring it down. Yes, it can take a while, but it’s do-able.

lil devils x.6071:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Adjust scoring to be relative to current activity and population (Large) is the Skirmish idea Tyler explained in this thread.

And PPK:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

The amount of score earned from PPK will be increased, so that it contributes more to the overall score.
*As a rough number, PPK may increase to 3-5 points, rather than 1, with diminishing returns on killing players who have been alive for less than 5 minutes
*We will also rebalance the Warscore for Caravan Kills, Caravan Delivery and Sentry Captures.

So what you are saying is zerg should run off cliff and die every 5 min then get back in the fight? That is what that boils down to.. they had no problem running back to Sm for cloaking waters for every push, they will have no prob jumping off a cliff to ensure diminished returns for their opponents.

Using the system to their benefit = New Meta. That Is exactly what is being stated when you implement things like that.

Yes, there should be no 5 min diminished returns. Don’t understand why this is even an idea!

Korgov.7645:

Aww, the dictatorship of the many…

None of these choices really appeal to me.

Adjust scoring to be relative to current activity and population (Large)
Lot of work over something that has high of chance going horribly wrong, benefits being controversial… just steer away from this option.

Change WvW Tick timer to 5 Minutes (Small)
This only fixes the tiny issue where capturing an objective just before tick grants few extra points. I assume the objective PPT would be lowered to match the timer, so that for example towers yield 3 and 1/3 points per tick – messy.

Provide features that increase a team’s ability to recover from large point disparities (Medium)
This could dilute the currently very active weekend period after the reset.

Implement scoring for objective capture (Small)
No. This has been thoroughly tested in EotM and the results are clear: no defending, avoid fights, blob up and k-train.

Modify objective scoring to be relative to upgrade level (Medium)
Since most of the passive points are from dolyaks, only changing the objective PPT amounts to very little effect.

If on the other hand the PPT from T3 objectives is set very high, for example PPT^Tier:

• non-upgrade objectives would be ignored
• servers would stack up forces on T3 objectives only
• waypointing monoblob between maps to flash capture T3 objectives would become preferred strategy

Rebalance scoring for actions that are not included in Points-Per-Tick (Small)
This probably means increasing points from player kills, sentry kills and dolyak kills. Increasing PPK by large amount can lead to situation where players avoid any fighting when the odds do not greatly favor them. When objectives are no longer the main source of points, why would any commander choose to go near siege fire?

No preference
Could this be reworded as Do not implement any of the above?

Edit: My vote went to the 5-min timer as it seems to do the least harm.

This is a real problem. You have had to make loads of assumptions here, some of which we know are wrong.For example, ANet have already said in another post that ppk is included in option 1. Not your fault, as we are all in the dark.

I really think that, if this poll is to be any use, it needs to be removed, reworded and reposted!

I have to say it’s great to have this level of interaction with the team, but this poll is bad.

After all the discussion on scoring, I could see two polls that might have worked:

1. “OK, thanks for all your ideas! Here are some of yours and some of ours, tidied up a bit and consolidated. They span the full range of ideas expressed. Please let us know which path you think we should take.”

2. “We’ve read all your comments and thought about them. Here are our revised suggestions. Please vote on them.”

The current poll_sounds_ like they have just ignored the feverish discussion on scoring, which they initiated, are just going ahead with their original ideas and all we get to do is set the order in which they are done. It may not be like that, but as we’ve had no feedback at all on the “talk scoring” thread, what are we supposed to think? At the very least this poll should have been backed by a document which defined what each of the options now meant.

The alternatives are not at all clear. It would have been better if each option was illustrated with options from Tyler’s mail.

At the moment people are left to basically guess which options are in which category or they simply vote for the ‘goal’, I.e. less imbalance, and maybe Anet then misinterpret that as a vote for a specific (but unspecified!) option.

Dawdler.8521:

lil devils x.6071:

The mindset that should ever be a way to win is what is ruining the game mode and making the players not care about score because with their current scoring system and the one proposed here , to win still means you PvD and siege hump REAL good. That is no way to reward a large scale PvP game mode. PvP should not be an after thought in a PvP game mode, it should be the focus and the reward.

And with the PPK > all mindset it will only mean this:

1 – People will siege hump more, because that give safe kills
2 – People will PvD more, because facing players may mean a defeat and loss of points
3 – People will only engage when outnumbering the enemy at least 5 to 1
4 – If you are not 5 to 1 on enemies, goto 1

I don’t think this is inevitable, but I guess that’s what a beta would prove.

Anyway, my suggestion to score ~50% of the matchup based on each team’s proportion of kills over the matchup would hopefully sort that anyway. You would need to be better at killing and hiding in a keep isn’t going to help that.

I think there’s merit in this idea. I made a similar one here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Do-you-still-hate-the-Desert-BL-after-patch/page/2#post6125752

Let’s just assume, for a minute, that the DBls are coming back! I know some don’t want it, but Anet said it’s happening so…..

How do we make these maps better? Lots have raised that the northern towers have no purpose, unlike in the ABls and I agree. Ideally they would move them. But if they can’t, some kinda fixed location, souped-up weapon that can reach, only outer, Garri from the towers sounds like a plan.

- The siege can still have to be built, just like a treb. Maybe even cost more.
- The treb spots in the ABl are effectively fixed anyway – only one effective spot in each tower, so no change there really
- There would need to be effective counters to each – no reason why the spots chosen should not be attackable, just like the northern towers in ABl.

So, accepting some just don’t even want the DBls fixed, they just want them gone, if they are coming back better the northern towers come into play rather just being karma-train spots!

Gideon.6742:

Making Thursday worth more will cause a lot of resentment from many players.

as I’ve said ad-nauseam elsewhere(Sorry!) the equivalent of Last Stand can be achieved, without any messing with the points, by changing reset to Sunday night (so busiest days are the last days) and increasing ppk, as ANet already propose. I think that’s a better way of doing it.

Anet have already said they are thinking of changing reset back to Saturday night when these changes kick-in (can’t remember if it was ‘officially’ or in the leaked release notes), but that would still leave Saturday night and Sunday for teams to get ahead. Better to have a slow build through the week, then an all-out Friday night to Sunday.

lil devils x.6071:

I didn’t say you want to just straight up increase PPK without conditions. I am saying they need to Increase PPK and LOOT while fighting over an objective without the use of siege You touch an AC then you get no PPK or LOOT.

I disagree with this for 2 reasons:

1. It would make defending stuff a nightmare. Either no one uses the siege or you have to invent some formula for paying people to use siege and agree it in time of crisis!

2. OK, maybe you don’t care about that. Maybe you’d prefer no siege fights even for keeps. But the other big reason is siege+ppk is a big reason not to face-rub keeps with a blob. Gonna lose a lot of people that way. A well organised group can stay alive, but a map blob, not so much. PvD against an outnumbered opponent could get a lot more costly.

Dawdler.8521:

When PPK become a major factor to the score, players will start to blaim their own side directly for loosing the game, creating a toxic instead of a fun enviroment. Not a generic “why dont we PPT more?!”. It will be “why did you die you tool, gtfo of WvW” and they point finger at specific players. I already hear commanders say that but at the end of the fight its always just a matter of picking yourself up and trying again. With PPT being a major factor, commanders will simply go “nope we cant afford another loss with these noobs” and that’s the end of fights on that border for all 3 sides. GG. The game now isnt fun anymore.

I understand the concern but follow that to its logical conclusion and scoring can’t measure any skill, because if people are bad their team mates will get upset. In team-based PvP you ARE dependent on your team mates, that’s the point. When skill is irrelevant those with it will leave and those that remain will just PvD for rewards. To some extent that is where we are now.

Everyone needs to keep a sense of perspective when things go wrong. If people are abusive they should be reported. Commanders already rage quit when they get a hopeless blob. It’s no fun wiping again and again. I don’t expect a change to the scoring will make much difference to that either way. But greater ppk might encourage more pug training instead of mindless swarming around the map as happens quite frequently on many servers atm.

TingleTangle, I think making ppk ~50% of the points is exactly what we want.

- It will ally the prime time guilds with scouts and defenders. No longer will fights barely contribute to the matchup. Even if the guilds don’t care about the points they will still be signifiucantly helping those that do.

- Having run the numbers using, historic data for, EU, NA, top and bottom of the league, at 5ppk the prime time 4 hours will score about 75%-100% more than 4 hours with just a handful, as opposed to only about 15%-30% now. It will be worth trying to earn points because it won’t all be outdone by a tiny number a few hours later. It should make the scoring more relevant to all.

- If another time zone has its own prime-time it can contribute every bit as much to the matchup.

- In so much as anyone cares about the score, it will actually reduce blobbing IMO. Right now blobs make a massive contribution to the score through ppt. With more ppk, rolling over objectives unopposed will contribute less. Instead, winning proper fights will be the way to amass points. Servers that want to win matchups will need to improve their fighting skills, not just blob numbers, especially off-peak.

But the great thing about ppk is the systems are already in place for it. It should be very easy to change the multiplier. If 5ppk did turn out to have undesired consequences it could be easily reduced to 3 or 4. On the other hand, we might even decide we want it to be 6 or 7 points per kill and guarantee that the points per hour in a busy time period (whenever that might be and whatever players bring it about) will be more than double a dead period, which seems very reasonable.

FYI, I took the data on two matchups – top matchup for EU and NA for the last week of the DBls (last week which was a full 7 days) and approximated the score if ppk was 5pts (no other changes). It was quite easy to see what the baseline tick (ppt + dolys etc), which seem to happen at all hours of the day. For both EU and NA the minimum (allowing for a few rogue data points on MOS Millenium that look like errors) seems to be about 1100 points. I then assumed anything over 1100 were points for kills – not perfect, but reasonable.

With the current scoring, in the quiet middle of the week the midnight-4AM accumulated score was 76% (EU) and 86% (NA) of the 8PM-midnight score, even with very clearly less activity. With 5ppk it changed to 52% (EU) and 65% (NA) a major shift.

Thanks to the Anet team for sharing their ideas with us. But, the “action level” idea seems incredibly unfair to all off-peak players. Not just overseas players but others who work shifts or just find it easier to play outside of “prime”.

What should matter is the actual level of activity, not some arbitrary peak and off-peak time slices. The activity level “fix” risks killing the game in off-peak times – just the opposite of what we should want.

If SEA/OCX have their own prime-time, when NA/EU is in bed then that should score fully. That is not nightcapping. What is bad is when a small number of players take objectives without opposition and have an impact on the score that far outweighs their efforts.

This all seems incredibly complicated too. It will take a lot of very risky development effort and end up needing to be reversed.

Why not take this step by step. If we increase the ppk as you already propose to 5 (or even 7) points per kill (whatever level is needed so about 40%-50% of the score is made from Friday evening to Sunday night and busy times (whenever they are) contribute more than when hardly anyone is on) and change the reset time to Sunday evening, so the time when most people are playing is at the end of the matchup instead of the beginning this might fix almost everything, without the need to set “activity levels” or make the last day artificially more important than the rest of the week.

If Player vs Player activity counts more than tick:

- There will be no runaway because the “final weekend”, when there is the most activity, earns most of the points

- Off peak players have exactly the same contribution as prime-time players – holding structures earns the same, killing earns the same – but if you kill less to cap things because there are fewer players you have less of an impact on the final score – that seems something few can argue against.

The only concern I can see is that this might somehow encourage blobbing, but I don’t think this would happen:

- if you are a massive blob people will avoid you rather than fight you
- In a mindless blob your zerglings will be picked off at the back by roamers
- If you face-rub a keep you may take it in the end, but hordes will probably die against siege in the process and the enemy will just run away at the end.

For all the above reasons a blob might end up being killed more than it kills.

The skirmish idea might be good too; If that replaced the ppt part of the score it would give people more regualar short term objectives. But the activity level, as described, seems unnecessary and unfair.

Anything they do should be simple, so the team can move on to other stuff we value ASAP. The leaked “draft” release notes, before the 19th, proposed increasing ppk AND dividing the day up into time slices and scoring according to the victor in each time slice AND changing the value of each slice so prime-time was more valuable than “the middle of the night” AND giving more points on the last day to give teams a chance to come back. That kind of complexity is, I fear, how we get to a choice between scoring or a load of QoL changes, rather than scoring being just one thing to prioritise alongside everything else.

It’s fair that you think that, but the majority did vote for scoring changes and there is a lot of frustration when people win against opposition only to lose when no one is playing.

Personally I think a lot of the reason people do not care about the score ATM is precisely because it is so ludicrous! A better scoring system might just get people re-engaged. And if the scoring actually made sense it might be fair to base more rewards on it!

That’s exactly why my proposal doesn’t change the points per tick or the points per kill, depending on time of day at all. No need to divide the day up into high scoring times and low scoring times, arbitrarily based on someone’s view of prime-time. All that matters is actual activity. If OCX have their own prime-time at 5AM EST that would count every bit as much. The relative importance of those 2 prime times would be very closely tied to the population at each time. On an OCX-heavy server their prime might even matter more.

To be honest, I disagree with the main premise behind this suggestion. One of the main challenges in WvW is to rally forces and overwhelm the opposition. A server that cannot get it’s forces on the field should not be helped out by the scoring system.

The problem, IMO, is not that servers with genuinely greater forces beat their opposition, but that servers can lose almost every fight in prime time, maybe ticking only 150-180 for 4 hours, yet cap with a fraction of the numbers, against no opposition, out-of-hours, hold the tick for 8 hours until someone shows up and win.

I realise your proposal might help in that situation but quite often, especially off-peak, the servers will have similar numbers overall but one will have a commander and 20 people, the other team will be dispersed, so, under your system, there will be no population handicap. And then the commander logs off, the populations are still equal, but no one can recap. The server that had the commander keeps ticking high. Fair enough, you might say, because one server was better organised. But still 20 people for an hour (say) are having a greater impact on the final result, fighting no one, than 200 people had in prime-time.

So I want something much simpler (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Scoring-option-for-Night-cappers/first#post6131431) – a system where kills are a far bigger percentage of the final score, so a group running around taking stuff against no opposition has far less impact on the outcome than those fighting through significant forces and winning.

You might think this would encourage “blobbing”, but a rubbish map blob probably won’t even do well under such a system – you only get kills by fighting, not by rolling over a handful of enemy as you stomp across the map! And you can imagine the losses they might take rubbing up against well sieged objectives, eventually taking them with shear numbers but losing dozens of lives in the process only to find just a handful of enemy to kill in the end! Also, it would be pretty easy for small groups to pick off zerglings at the back, killing more than the blob itself!

Josh XT.6053:

Osu.6307:

I can’t speak for all on Mag, but my impression is that the stability buff was the #1 reason for many to return to wvw. ABL helped as well, but is probably #2 at best.

Stability buff helped, but it is most likely #2 reason for people returning. Even after stability got messed up, a lot of people still played, it was just the GvG scene that really died off. When they took away Alpine, that was when the population dip really happened.

While I am glad they changed stability, it doesn’t effect me or my guild much if at all since we’re a roaming group. We returned to WvW because Alpine was returned. I can’t speak for everyone either, but I think stability buff wasn’t nearly as important as Alpine returning.

Alternative PoV:

The HoT release was the final nail in WvW but:

- It was only the final nail. The game was almost dead beforehand. Just diehards (I was one) logging on out of habit.

- The original DBls were part of the problem, but the worst of those problems have now been fixed.

- Much more a cause of the population problem were all the other new ‘distractions’ – new class, new PvE maps, guild halls, new specialisations, new stats all to grind for.

The population had started to return, from the (very) lowest point even before the April 19th patch as people finished their HoT tasks, but the long-standing problems and the above meant it was never going to get back to days of old.

After April 19th numbers were way up. People were not playing DBl under sufferance but because it was the place for the best fights once the population was big enough to support multiple maps- just like the old days with ABls.

When the ABls returned there was a brief spike in activity for nostalgia, now the numbers are similar if not smaller than the last week of the DBls. But then, of course, that was likely a spike too, due to all the changes introduced on the 19th!

Bottom line: It is impossible to separate all these different problems and changes from one another. Everyone is letting their own Confimation Bias get in the way of a reasoned debate!

Yeah, it was always cheesy to be able to nuke down the gate of a fortified keep by bashing any number of staves and swords and daggers against it! " We don’t care that you’ve taken the time to properly build defences to your keep and even have the people to man them – we’re The Blob and we’re coming in!"

Personally, I think it might be OK if certain long cooldown utility skills (e.g ele) were able to do damage, but not 1-5.

You’ve highlighted the problem- population. If you keep playing one matchup per server you are spreading the population across 7 maps instead of 4. If you try to increase the overall pool to potentially fill 7 maps the queue for EB would be insane. If you are suggesting each server is involved in 3 different matchups – EB, DBl & ABl, with different opponents and allies, that just sounds really messy.

Rotating the maps is far simpler and if some want to take a break every few weeks that’s probably not bad for their health! In fact some percentage of the players do that already because they get burnt out or bored. This just gives them something else to hang it on.

The danger is that, even for ‘good’ things, the majority would probably vote for “Ok, but needs more work” and probably always would! The game is never ‘finished’. So if the team are really using this to set short term priorities (and I don’t doubt they are) they could be stuck reworking the same stuff forever!

Really I think what they are saying is “are you basically happy with this”, “can we move on to the other things that bother you” and, although nothing is perfect, I think the clear response (for once!) is “yes”.

Now, once they have fixed the scoring, I think it would make sense to try and make the rewards and the scoring align, but that’s for another day.

Yep!. If you follow the link you’ll see I suggested they reward activity by greatly increasing the contribution of ppk, so although capturing an objective has the same impact whatever the hours and those play in the “off hours” don’t feel their play time is being devalued, having to fight through 80 players to do it is valued appropriately too! But that’s obviously a bit off-topic for this thread.

Just to throw the cat among the pigeons! As suggested here why not change the scoring so it’s much, much more influenced by activity, so Friday night through Sunday have a much bigger influence on the score, then change reset to Sunday night. Given that scoring is the next thing they are going to focus on, now is the time to talk about it.

Benefits: The the matchup stops being over by day 3. The end of the match, the most popular time to play, the most important time to play and the weekend all become the same thing Everyone can get back from work on Friday at the right time for them and the excitement is just beginning!

I assume you will not count “don’t count my vote” when assessing the 75%! Obviously that’s what “don’t count my vote” means. Kinda misleading having it in the pie tbh

Phantom.5389:

DBL was all aboard the pugtrain and take towers and leave the bunkers be (eum, sorry I meant keeps). Only time those keeps flipped was when there was no defense (cough cough, night time, cough, cough).

……………

The only time Desert BL came back alive (somehow) was when Alpine BL was finally announced. Even then, Alpine BL is destroying DBL in term of activity.

Of course there were some who came back when the ABls returned, I’d expect it when they have been away for a while.. However, while I can’t speak about your experience as a solo roamer, the rest of your comments and your conclusions are, sorry, simply not true across the board.

The population changed a couple of weeks ago due to the many changes to WvW as a whole, plus the significant changes that were (necessarily!) made to the DBls. People were not just waiting for the ABls.

With the population change, there were good fights for the keeps last week, in peak and off-peak hours, with large numbers and smaller 10-20 man groups. They were every bit as interesting and sometimes long, sometimes swift, as the fights for ABl bay/hills.

It’s possible to celebrate the return of your preferred Bl without over the top claims.

I agree. If we are having rotation weekly or every 2 weeks is best. Maybe we should leave ABl up for 2-4 weeks initially, just to give it a fair run, for those who love it, after months of DBl, but after that switch to weekly or random would be my preference.

TheGrimm.5624:

Josh XT.6053:

that was about 20 hours in desert BL

So you never took time to adapt and learn new tactics, got it. You could have just said that.

^^^

…and people really do need to stop claiming those that do not agree with them are scrubs/pugs/not WvW players. Just let people know your opinion and accept there is not only one.

lil devils x.6071:

The problem though is those who will not play the DBL’s will either not play WvW for 3 months or the Queues for EBG will go through the roof for 3 months straight ruining WvW again for many. Having maps people wont play on in the game means the game mode is broke for 3 months.

My point exactly. I come at it from a different place – I like both (now DBl has been improved), but I understand those that hate DBl will log off or get very bored In queue if borders are only rotated every 3 months. If they were to alternate weekly or pick them randomly there is a chance people would put up with the map they don’t like and some (I get not all!) might decide they are not as bad as they remember, especially if Anet spend a few weeks further tweaking the DBls, e.g. making the northern towers strategically important and taking away a few of the remaining, most detested PvE elements, like pop-up rocks!

Krypto.2069:

Seriously, though… it would be nice imo to see a rotation of sorts. DBL one week or month, ABL the next.

Anet have send they intend to rotate the borders. Good plan IMO, I think both have unique playstyles and benefits. The only problem is they have suggested swapping maybe every 3 months, which I fear may be too long for either ABl or DBl devotees!

That’s fair enough, but there were other servers with very little coverage and that’s what alliances were supposed to help with. I think there is little doubt, given their position in the table, they would have been paired up but for the need to keep a multiple of 3 servers and their decision to only link 2 servers at this time.

Maybe we should just appoint Faux Play as WvW overlord and all wanting to play should go through an audition/accreditation test by him to make sure they are up to his high standards? /s

Of course this is not true. Different servers have very different WvW populations so merging RoS and Vabbi (for example) into their respective alliances did not come anywhere near to doubling their manpower!

Still Abaddon and Dzagonur did do really badly out of the change. The difficulty was keeping a multiple of 3 servers in EU while only pairing servers. Still, it is a beta. Hopefully they will fix this somehow!

Helys Vikonas.9125:

…. Or doing double stacks (like ROS+Vabbi+GH), which wouldn’t have helped queue-wise either.

tbh, that sounds like a better solution to me. GH+Vabbi+RoS is unlikely to be as stacked as Deso+Vabbi, with all the easy , cheap transfers to Vabbi that people (apparently) have been taking.

I know I’ve said this several times elsewhere, sorry if you have to read it again, but I really don’t think we need to do any more than increase the contribution of ppk to, say (exact % to be agreed) 50%.

Then, no one can say those playing “out of prime time” are less valued. The points they get for their cap are exactly the same. However, if people have to fight and defeat players to get that cap that effort is recognised too. No one can say that out of hours players are being undervalued, yet the final result will be more influenced by the times when activity is highest, which just makes sense. It is also self balancing in that the contribution of a particular period of time to the end of the week score will be heavily influenced by the actual activity at that time not any arbitrary “time zones” determined in advance.

Looking at the detail of how it might work, in the poll thread I suggested we could drop feed extra points into the ppk “pool” each tick, so ppk is always 50% of the ppk+ppt total, but share the points according to the then ratio of kills across the teams in the week so far. All that would matter for the ppk 50% of the score is your teams share of the kills at the end of the matchup. Also, if the matchup were to start and end on Sunday night the number of kills would be much higher at the end of the matchup (because Friday night and weekends are much busier), making the final few days far more exciting and influential, another one of Anet’s objectives – stopping matchups being over on Monday and giving people a reason to keep playing. All without the need for overly complex scoring schemes that do risk making “non prime time” players feel they are being devalued/discriminated against. What’s more, it’s so simple it could probably happen really quickly and free up some of that valuable WvW dev time for other things!

I think Anet had problems in Eu. They had to get the league down to a multiple of 3. They could only link language servers with others of the same. They also decided only to link 2 servers at this time, although they have said they could link more.

Matching Deso with anyone was decidedly odd. Guilds server stacking causes server fortunes to ebb and flow and Deso’s fortunes were low when alliances came in but Deso is unquestionably a T1 server and shouldn’t have been allied. Probably they should have created one or two 3-way alliances of more similar servers instead.

Just to say, I’m not crying because it in anyway unfairly affects our current matchup! Just Deso was never in need of help and matching such different communities as a long-term T1 server and one of the “most solidly” T9 servers was probably destined to be troubled.

OneEightHundred.5689:

Taking a keep now means taking it while the other team is asleep.

It’s ok not to like a map. If one thing is clear from this thread its that opinions differ. But I’m sorry, this is just wrong. If that’s the case you are doing it wrong. We have had great fights for all 3 keeps in prime time and either side of it, with 60 and 10 and point inbetween and won them. Sometimes it’s taken a long time, just like in old Bay and Hills, but it can be done. The strategies are just different, which is why rotation ( sorry to repeat it) is good. It’s just, unlike on ABl, we haven’t worked out every conceivable tactic and counter-tactic, which should be a good thing!

Puck.9612:

Jong.5937:

So anything before last week is meaningless. You need to try the DBls now to judge them and on our server, as clearly on many others, the last week has been great.

Already have, they still suck.

That’s fine. I could argue that past experience might be stopping you being open-minded but you are free to disagree.

However, you will see some have also got very very bored of the ABls. People difer. Many would disagree with both opinions. So, best to stop trying to pick one over the other and go for rotation…. as planned.

The “trend” is meaningless. WvW was only changed just over a week ago and since then numbers have returned. Alpine borders would have been almost, if not quite, as empty since HoT, because the population had plummeted and with reduced numbers people filled EB (or often didn’t even manage that) to get fights.

The original state of the DBls was a contributor to the population drop, but was not the majority of the problem – no rewards, bad meta (e.g stability), WvWers forced to PvE for elite specialisations, mastery (OK, not essential if you are pure WvW) and Guild Hall upgrades, together were a bigger problem.

But that’s not to say the DBls did not have problems. Just they were launched when the game was in a perilous state anyway. And when there was no one there, no body bothered learning the overly complex routes adding to the confusion and frustration when they did go.

So anything before last week is meaningless. You need to try the DBls now to judge them and on our server, as clearly on many others, the last week has been great. People are now learning the improved maps and they will work well in rotation with the ABls.

Of course there are still things we can point to that we would like to improve, but that will always be true of the whole game.

That is an OK test, but far from perfect. It would be much worse than a proper managed solution. The problem is ping is currently far from dependable when it depends randomly on how each packet gets from your PC to the transatalantic fibre and then down to the remote server. It can be not bad, it can be poor.

There is absolutely no doubt that if Anet positioned their servers in a datacenter on the fibre backbone somewhere “in the middle” (eg. Ireland or East Coast USA), bought entry points, with guaranteed service levels, to that backbone across the USA and Europe and then set the client to use the nearest entry point, the latency would be far reduced from what we mostly get now, if connecting from Europe to USA or visa-versa.

Of course, this may not be cheap! I understand that. But, if not Anet, a competitor will provide such a platform.

CrimeMaker.8612:

Have the server located in m middle of the ocean and latency for all will be perfect

lol! Seriously, people are looking at putting datacenters on the bottom of the sea – infinite free cooling! Probably not the middle of the Atlantic though, sadly.

Sekai.2987:

no thanks i like my servers in frankfurt, i dont need a 100-200ping

Your perceived latency is a lot more than the raw ping time to Frankfurt You don’t know that they could not remove 100ms by investing in new server infrastructure, making the change invisible. It’s possible.

Spanish and French servers work this way already, just suffering lag. Spanish servers have a substantial South American community and probably North American too. French have Canadians. Germany is probably a problem, but shouldn’t stop all the rest of the world if this could really make the game 24×7.

And, honestly Tyler (thanks for chipping in btw), while, as we discussed, there may be technical reasons this can’t work the fact that there are currently 2 separate datacenters is hardly it. We know that and we know why, but at some point, if it’s technically possible, other games will be doing it! That article from the wsj shows people are working on it. Truly global esports will be a thing unless the laws of the universe stop it!

So good he said it twice, but……. Yes

Definitely! Great, great work and a great new level of engagement. As a community we are decidedly bipolar and just about impossible to please!

Maybe the “tome level” reward should be a “bag of experience” a bit like the recipe bags or armor bags, where you get to choose your reward from a few options.

For experience they could be a Tome, or a WvW level (still valuable for the title if nothing else, but I think that gives a tome anyway, so that would need a rework!) and maybe a few other options others could think of!

I agree we now get a crazy number of these. Will anyone other than f2p ever level a character again!