Guild Wars 2

Tzun.6073:

VS has got to be our objective, we need to surpass them, otherwise say Hello to Tier 2 and most likely even lower Tiers, because people will jump ship, I assure you that.

First of all, your rating also depends on the amount of points you’re scoring, not just the position in the matchup, so you should also always aim to maximize your point income.

Second: let’s say we drop in T2.
And? Where’s the problem in that?

We already went all the way down to T3. If it happens again, it’s not a big issue.

You (and the other strategical genius posting immediately after you) are also assuming that you can somehow stay in an upper tier than your coverage could ever guarantee by choosing a tactic over another. In case both of you haven’t noticed yet, final score is a direct function of the number of man hours a server is pouring into WvW.
Numbers >>>>>>>> tactics with this system, so even on the off chance you could actually play in such a way as to keep your server in T1 when its population cannot sustain it, it would work for one week, two at the very best. Long term, it’s unsustainable to keep fighting with servers which massively outnumber you 12-18 hours every day.

You want to keep Desolation in T1? Start asking your NA/Oceanic/Asian friends to transfer en masse on Desolation. This will impact our chances to permanently stay in T1 ten thousands times more than focusing Vizunah for a few days.

Tzun.6073:

Is it better to settle for third? Because that’s what going to happen if we don’t get out sh…t together.

Strategically speaking, given the situation right now, it makes exactly zero sense for both Vizunah and Desolation to kill each other. If we were on Vulcan instead of Earth, you’d see both servers engaged in a total 2 vs 1 against BT to try and reduce them to sub-100 points per tick every time it’s realistically possible. The only moment when it starts making sense attacking each other is once you have mathematical certainty that even a perfect 2 vs 1 is not going to change the final result of the matchup.

Of course I fully realize that this is indeed Earth, and that people reach decisions mostly by emotional means rather than rational; that however doesn’t mean I have to commit the same mistake :P

Triffek.9268:

Desolation if you want to be second in this match, start to focus VS on Eternal. We atacking them from Durios and you atacking us on Anzalia. Your behaviour is incomprehensible for me

Desolation doesn’t settle for second place.
Or at the very least, I don’t. I won’t speak for others.

XxTAFxX.6741:

I’m sick and tyred of ruin and iron trying to get all the glory,in eb i did not see one iron guild in eb anyway,maybe they don’t do eb,i and many other smaller guilds have put sweat and blood in playing eb.

Iron has never played on EB in these last weeks. The Iron players you see in EB are usually staying there while waiting out the queue to the designated Iron borderland (Iron main force plays during EU prime time so yes, they usually meet queues).

Just open the WvW map during 21:00-01:00 GMT, check the borderland map with the biggest Deso presence, that’s where Iron is.

saVdoom.2067:

@Thread
Probs to VS honestly. You guys are still T1 being a FR server after so long without a russian/american community (that i know off), so congratulations!

@Desolation
I think i did warn you guys about RUIN coming to your server, back when you guys were fighting us at T3. It was bound to happen and you guys were warned.

A couple of points here:

• Putting in “lots of hours” can only work for one week, maybe 2. Vizunah is still here because it has a stable night population which is higher than everyone else except Desolation (if Ruin stays) and now Blacktide. It doesn’t matter how dedicated you are, sooner or later you’re going to need to sleep.

• Even assuming the worse happens and every single player belonging to Ruin transfers away and/or stops playing, what were the rest of Desolation players supposed to do once “warned”? Treat them like lepers?

I still think the only way of having a stable bracket with balanced matchups is to setup (minimum) 3 servers with full, proper 24/7 coverage. Anything else and we will permanently be looking at a numbers’ race. Ruin move was smart and they should be followed by more NA guilds; essentially the dedicated WvW ones now playing on low-bracket servers, should transfer on the 2-3 top EU servers to help us achieve the balanced state. For them transferring to the T1 NA ones is unpalatable due to server crowding and long queues, here they would give a massive boost to the top servers while being able to play with no queue. It’s a win-win situation and the sooner people realize it, the better we’re going to have some interesting matchups which are balanced throughout the whole week and actually decided by skills instead of whoever has more people online during the week.

Syndic.4762:

It’s no secret we have been prioritizing Desolation because we expected a lot bigger resistance from their American players and guilds.

If you seriously believed you’d face hundreds of NA players on Desolation, you’ve been misled. As it has been already stated multiple times, the only significant NA presence on Desolation (so far at least) is Ruin, and even during the best nights they never had enough numbers to fill more than one map. If you can bring 100 players (total, on all 4 maps) to the table, you’ve already outnumbered Desolation’ s night team. And even if you had zero night presence, your morning numbers would have been more than enough to completely undo their nightcap and lead you into afternoon/prime time with a point lead.

Sorry for not being able to provide a significant challenge to offpeak BT players, but we can’t wave a magical wand and make WvW players appear out of thin air

Back to the matchup itself, BT is completely dominating for the third morning in a row so I’d say the game is pretty much over for this week, BT right now has more points then VS and Deso combined. Props to them for setting up such a huge strike force, right now it’s utterly impossible for any EU server that I know of to match their numbers throughout the day at every time except prime. We were looking for a good fight and you guys certainly gave that and much more.

BTW, for those saying that Deso “has lost its fighting spirit”: I cannot speak for what’s happening during EU nights but I can assure you the numbers you’ve been seeing at other times are pretty much consistent with what was happening last weeks too. Desolation has always had precious few players engaging in WvW during mornings and afternoons, that’s why there have always been maps with zero queue even during weekends. The “Full” status is due to a big PvE playerbase, but most of Deso players are busy farming Orr. That was always the case since the game started. Obviously you get higher numbers when you’re winning, that’s true for pretty much any server, but the players providing those higher numbers only while winning are usually busy doing jumping puzzles anyway so it’s not like they provide a major addition to the WvW effort.

Hopefully we can gather more guilds playing in the 00:00 – 18:00 CET timeframe as we could really use the added coverage.

See you on the field, and those who have been hit by the dedicated WvW Deso guilds know what happens when they enter a map

Back on topic again, this is how it looks on a Saturday morning on Desolation:

situation at 10 AM (CET time = GMT +1):

http://s17.postimage.org/xxai5suun/gw742.jpg

situation at 12:46 PM:

http://s11.postimage.org/5j33hzhs3/gw773.jpg
http://s14.postimage.org/eay5a1og1/gw772.jpg

I extend again my invitation to all players living in GMT +/- 9-14 zones [yes, there’s actually a country with part of it on GMT +14, it’s Kiribati] to come and have a look at Desolation. What do you get out of it? Well:

• you get to fight on a server who fought his way back to the T1 bracket, with good organization, several hardcore WvW guilds, and a “never surrender” attitude
• your contribution will be massive as your prime time will cover our weakest spot. And as you can see from the score, you will find plenty of opponents to fight…
• all of this in a situation with ZERO QUEUES. You can easily see from the screenshots above we completely lack any presence in at least 2 out of 4 maps, and that’s over a 3-hour time span on a Saturday. Week days are even worse.

So if you’re looking for good, hard fights on a server which can support you when you’re not here, while still being able to easily join the WvW maps in your prime time… Desolation is the place to go

Just so you know, we had a player from BT use this very same method (thief stealthing to stop us capping a supply camp) against us this morning. Ultimately it only bought him a couple minutes though.

Wapakalypse.7038:

The main goal this week should be – getting Elona Reach into T1 and get rid of Vizu.

I strongly disagree. The main goal for Desolation should always be to win the match. If it’s not possible due to lacking numbers in certain timezones, we recruit and try again, harder.

Anyway, BT morning cap brutal as expected, we shall see how the rest of the week goes. On my part had a really fun 3 hour fight in BT map this morning, started with 5 of us capping supply camps around the map and ended with a massive assault with multiple trebs retaking our keep. Xaoc everywhere, just how many players do you guys have XD

Keep up the fights, this is what T1 should all be about.

I’d imagine most of the non-language specific servers are international, as they gather people from all the countries whose population does not speak FR/DE/ES.

If you mean which EU servers have a non-EU presence, I’m guessing Blacktide is the other obvious candidate due to its significant Russian presence (for some weird reason RU is not considered part of EU by ArenaNet, as you can see from this page listing the geographic designation of all countries, just click on “Europe” “North America” and “Other” at the bottom of the page to expand the list).

Power/Vitality/Toughness gear can be obtained trivially easy by doing dungeons, there’s multiple of them giving the gear, both the full armor set and the weapons (AC, HotW and at least one more I don’t remember right now). On top of that, you can get all the armor pieces except the helm from Orr karma vendors. Really, that stat combination is just about the easiest to get in the whole game.

The only thing you cannot get elsewhere is the jewelry, however notice that the most expensive one (amulet) does have a crafted equivalent, it’s called the emerald pendant. It’s expensive to get though (sold around the 27 gold mark right now), but farming the gold to buy it is still faster than farming the badges unless you’re an ele on a winning server.

Anyway, right now as far as I know the only things you have to buy with badges are the rings (396 badges each) and accessories (330 badges each) for a total of 1452 badges. Everything else you’re much better off getting via alternatives.

Brunners.7251:

I really don’t think we need any more Americans. We seem to do just fine the way we are. We need morning players, not more night ones.

We are doing fine now during the EU night but the maps are very far from being full. The moment another server emerges with a better night presence we will be back to being nightcapped.

It’s really pretty easy: unless you’ve queues on all 4 maps you’re playing with less than the maximum amount of players. And at the moment we only have queues during EU prime time on Desolation.

I agree than the EU mornings are our weakest spot right now, but we could do with increased coverage on all the other non-prime time slots too.

Also, west coast US is on pacific time i.e. GMT – 8. That means 9 AM CET is their midnight so that would already be a start for covering those mornings.

Back on topic: Desolation could really, really, REALLY do with anyone from GMT +/- 8 and higher. Right now our mornings during the week see us having to compete with a nearly completely depleted force, as the US-based population goes to sleep and the EU-based one goes to work.
Already Vizunah is massively daycapping us and next week it’s only going to become much worse with Blacktide, so if you’re in any of these timezones and are interested in joining a T1 bracket fight while having zero queue, you could do a lot worse than having a look at our server.

Gotcha, thanks.

Now if only I had the willpower to start working on that spreadsheet… :P

Quick question here: how much money do you need to fund the initial search for good combines? I’m guessing you need a pretty high amount of tries just to compile that spreadsheet in the first place…

Inuko.1452:

Thanks! We’ll see how it goes. I think that whilst I agree with your “super-server” sentiment it’s now a case of if you can’t beat them…join them or better yet CREATE THEM =D

This is the only rational solution to the messed-up scoring system. We need more servers with 24/7 coverage, not less. It’s the only way the system can work.

It also makes for strong servers with short queues which everyone ought to appreciate…

It’s a little difference when you nightcapping yourself ( and plz don’t tell me about the famous and imaginary canadian zerg of VS… CaSu… ) and when you nightcapping with oversea ppl, ppl having their prime time when 90%+ of EU player sleep…

No it’s not. Nightcapping is nightcapping. You started it so don’t try to take the moral high ground now. If you wanted to be “fair” (whatever that means), you’d have used NO nightcapping, not “nightcapping with only french people”.

You told us to adapt to your nightcapping, we did it, end of story. The sooner you accept this the better will be.

And finally, i understand you feel less concerned by country-tagged problems. It’s no big deal, but i whish you could understand us. We won’t be able to get 24/7 coverage while tagged FR or DE.
We won’t be able to be competitive anymore. And it basically means the end of WvW on tagged servers.

I understand you fully and I agree that it sucks but this is not simply related to language specific servers. Even most of the english speaking servers will be left in the dust, because there’s not enough people around to fill more than 6 (or maybe 9) servers total, worldwide, with a 24/7 population. Hence my proposal in my previous post to create these “global WvW servers” and somehow unlink them from the PvE server activity.

That said… I warned about the fact that under this system most servers will die one month ago. Where were all the Vizunah players then?

Tygra.4570:

Get your facts straight man. I do not mean to be mean but what you are saying is nonsense.

<snip>

What you got wrong is that you thought Deso was a T1 server : Deso was here thanks to the 24 hrs matchups, and could in absolutely no way compete with Elona or Arborstone. Those servers just needed some weeks to climb the ladder because they started to play with the 1 week matchups.

What you got wrong is thinking that the EU ladder wasn’t stabilized because Desolation wasn’t in T1.

This is you not making any sense.
My objection is independent of server names or Desolation’s specific position. EU ladder was never stabilized, all the matches have been complete blowouts, before last week, ALL the EU games have been already decided by tuesday at the latest, maybe wednesday in some rare cases. And this is “stable”? According to whom?
The fact you lost one week to Elona due to german holidays doesn’t make the T1 bracket “stable”. In fact it underlines the instability of the system, where any single holiday not shared by the servers will decide the match like what happened again just last week due to a single Friday holiday.

I don’t know about you, but I like my WvW being decided by skill, not by whomever has more insomniacs. And the fact these insomniacs are from your own country is utterly irrelevant to me. They make you win by PvDooring, so don’t come and cry to me when we do the same to you.
The difference between me and all the whiners here is that I still hope the situation will stabilize in the future with at least 3 servers having full 24/7 coverage and providing good, balanced matchups. All that you want is going back to “yippeee we have more night players then them so we autowin forever, gratz us and our imba Pvdoor skills!!!”

Tygra.4570:

Elona has beaten us at night, and can do it without holidays. Arborstone has beaten us at night. Blacktide as of right now will probably crush Vizu even with “less” night power : their EU daytime looks extremely powerful (kudos to gf/nug, wish we fight again soon).

Utterly and completely false and you are either pretending to not know it or you never set foot in WvW.
During primetime, with full maps everywhere, and assuming a 1vs1vs1 (i.e. not a 2vs1) even with a superiority display of masterclass proportions it’s completely impossible for a server to open a sustainable advantage bigger than, let’s say, a 350-175-170 against the other two servers, the simple mass of players available to all 3 sides will see to that. This translates to a point gain of 700/hour, virtually impossible to sustain for long periods, as opposed to the 2800/hour you can get and keep for several hours with unopposed capping.
This means Blacktide can crush you all they want during primetime, but if they don’t have enough at night (or early morning) to counteract Vizunah’s nightcapping, they are doomed. You know this, we know this, everyone know this, and that’s why you are complaining so loudly: you find yourself now beaten at the one and only way this system currently provides to guarantee victories i.e. 24/7 coverage.

Tygra.4570:

Do you want this for the EU ladder ? Probably, because you’d be number 1 forever.
Do EU people want this for their ladder ? Not a chance.

I am EU, so please don’t speak for myself, thank you very much.

Tygra.4570:

FR and DE have always been among the most competitive players in the online gaming history. In a month our EU ladder will be as messed up as the NA one.

The way the ladder is right now isn’t competition. Without competition, lower tier servers will depopulate, and higher tier servers will be tired of PvDoor.

Right, because Vizunah autowinning with those 695-0-0 was “competition”. Gotta love double standards.
You’re saying exactly what I was claiming you were saying: “Arenanet, FR and DE servers have a god given right to win so please modify the system so we can keep winning forever, thank you”.

Tygra.4570:

WvW is such a huge feature on GW2, we player have to help ANet with our suggestions, because it would be a shame if you remove any competitive side of it.

I just did, it was the part of my post you conveniently chose to ignore. I understand that since that suggestion involved actually competitive WvW instead of FR/DE autowins it’s not what you’re looking for but hey, I’m neither FR nor DE so you will excuse me if I don’t agree with you on that part.

Kada Feed.1782:

I personnaly would have prefer to fight the new Deso, without RUINS. We would have seen how the europeans of this EU server have evolved.

I think people complains about what is going to happen, how cheap victory will be : you won’t win over De, Fr or Sp servers cause of your own actions, because of a good strategy on the battlefield. You will win because somebody will be playing when you and most of your Fr, De or Sp ennemies will sleep. Because it’s what it’s going to happen : ppl tend to make what is needed to make victory easier.

Except that is exactly the same reason why Vizunah has been winning so far. And I’ve no doubt you’d have preferred fighting Deso without Ruin, it would have resulted in several other weeks of 695-0-0 nightcappings by Vizunah.

I’m completely mystified how people here declare “nightcapping is good, except if made by NA people on EU servers, then it’s bad and Arenanet should forbid it”. Might as well be saying “hey Arenanet can you please make my server start every week with a 200k advantage so we always win no matter what” because that’s essentially what is being asked here. And make us all a favor and don’t mention the ONE WEEK OF GERMAN HOLIDAYS which allowed Elona to win. Because using that week as an excuse and declaring the system works because of it it’s just the same as asking for that 200k permanent advantage: “oh yeah the system works, you see? we can be beaten one week every year so everything is ok”.

And spare me the “you can get organized and have your own EU-based night crew too” bull.
Fact is: unless by some miraculous luck two servers manage to get two EXACTLY IDENTICAL long term night crews, there will always be one who has more people at night (or early morning or afternoon or whatever). That server is always going to autowin forever, until another server comes and gets a bigger night crew. Then it will be the “new” server to autowin forever until another one comes etc. This crappy cycle of foregone matchups whose conclusion everyone can foresee at monday morning will only end the moment you have two (or more) servers with real, full 24/7 coverage. Those who claim that the EU bracket was “fine” before Ruin came are the one who were WINNING i.e. the servers with the biggest initial night crews. Of course “everything was fine” for you. Let me tell you, being on the other side of the 695-0-0 everything was MOST DEFINITELY NOT FINE. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Right now, the only decent way out of this mess I can see is for Arenanet to create a few “WvW global servers” (much less than the amount of servers currently going on, probably something like 6-9 of them in total) and make guilds “represent” one of these “WvW global servers” much like what happens with single characters representing guilds. Then, when you zone into WvW, you get automatically teleported to the zones which belong to your “WvW global server”, and when you get out, you re-zone into your normal “PvE server” which is the same as the servers of today.

This way people can keep their national language-based servers for PvE activities while also getting automatically organized into global 24/7 servers for WvW purposes. And since the engine is already heavily instanced and can (supposedly) allow for guesting and inter-server hopping, it shouldn’t be impossible to modify the system so that you belong to a “PvE server” when outside of WvW zones and to a “global WvW server” whenever engaged in WvW.

Camping jumping puzzle is never worth it. “Strategic asset” is a myth, all you’re denying is a few siege blueprints and those can be purchased with money which everyone can get by farming Orr (or whatever) without taking up precious slots in the WvW maps. And don’t start pointing me at golem blueprints please, there’s no guarantee of getting those and most of the time you will get maybe 15-20 silvers worth of blueprints, one dungeon run and you’re already higher than that.

To the OP: Alt-F4 is your friend, at least until they fix it. And before anyone starts whining: it’s resource denial to your opponents, so if camping JP is legit, so it’s quitting to avoid giving resources to your enemies.

Troma.3250:

In progress Tombs ! in progress. I hope they will come. I saw Disorder league (GF, NuGs etec, good old enemys) went on Blacktide, this server will be powerfull too.

Or the french stop acting like kids and ally (too late) or someone help us. If not, it’s our death. End of story

There’s an easy alternative: all players seriously dedicated to WvW migrate to whichever 3-6 servers with 24/7 WvW coverage will emerge once the “concentration process” is completed.

Yeah it sucks to be forced to switch servers, but if Arenanet doesn’t change this joke of a system, it’s the only way to get some decent matchups in the long run.

iomyna.4859:

It’s not about FR/DE/ES not speaking english, but about Singaporeans, Italians, Norwegians not speaking FR/DE/ES language. The tag is a language tag and it’s far more difficult to recruit a foreign guild on this server than on a server with EU tag.

So complain to Arenanet instead of slagging Ruin or any other guild which reaches the obvious conclusion. It wasn’t the players who designed such a pathetic excuse for a scoring system.

What annoys me is that some of us immediately called Arenanet out on this and foresaw the obvious evolution (cfr.: my post at https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Night-Capping-and-YOU/page/9, seventh post from the bottom, for some reason the permalink doesn’t work), while people from the winning servers (including Vizunah) just trolled us on the forums saying “deal with it”. And now that the shoe is on the other foot (and not even that, since you still win), all of a sudden everyone realizes the system is crap… well duh, welcome to enlightenment.

However, I don’t understand why you keep trying to deny or underestimate the advantage given by having a big oversea presence has ?

I never denied it, I take issue if someone claims it’s unfair. Let me reinstate one more time: the way the system is setup, even a ridiculously small numeric difference in players (let’s say, 60 vs 40 during the night) will result in massive point differences at the end of the week. The only way this system can work (i.e. creating balanced matches decided by skill rather than by numbers) is when there’s no difference at all, and that can be realistically achieved only once you have (at least) 3 servers with full maps at all times. So servers trying to get multiple timezones are not “unfair”, they’re smart and you can only hope we get more of them or WvW will die and soon.

Anything else and the game is a pure numbers’ game. Want proof? check what happened to this very matchup: one morning with numeric difference = game over.

Only because Friday is holiday in France, (and 10:30 is morning not night) and it was also the last battle to win the matchup.
He is talking about the typical night, when Deso is ticking 600+ like Tuesday or Wednesday.

If it’s so typical, how come it happened 2 nights out of 7? Even if you discount weekend nights, it’s still 2 out of 5. And it “casually” happened at the time VS had the biggest lead (around 18k points) and as soon as VS realized what was happening, it was able to easily match Desolation night numbers for the rest of the matchup.

Also, if you think Desolation WvW players are not dedicated and they can just live the easy life because they can bring 666 players to WvW on a 24/7 basis you clearly have not been following this match. Just what happened this morning should be proof enough of the colossal holes Deso’s WvW coverage still has. Any server who can fill their mornings will sweep us aside without even trying, and having full maps during the night will also result in the same. Hell… having full maps at any time except prime will result in the same, since that’s the only time of the day when all of Deso’s WvW maps have a queue in them.

Or do you seriously think we didn’t have commanders clocking in at 10-12 hours a day to try and win this matchup?
Jeez, at times like this I wish Ruin was indeed a guild who could constantly fill all maps, just to hear the cries of a server faced with a REAL 24/7 presence.

Jaghen.8314:

Yes we can !

LOL, yeah sure. And RUIN has 2000 members in WvW all the time. Think by now people have began to understand where the truth stands

10:30 TODAY. Friday morning. And 295 points held at 5AM, and now tell me you can hold half the points on all 4 maps with 40 players total.

Also, Deso has zero queues on at least 1-2maps even during weekend mornings (Saturday-Sunday). So yeah… who outnumbers whom?

Maybe AS will wake up since they did almost nothing this week, but VS’s core teams of 30-40 players which tried to play at night this week seem to be extremely tired.

Again with this 40 players bull? Man, check up my previous post in this very thread, Deso with outmanned debuff 3 maps out of 4 at 10:30, and VS holding 295 points tonight at 5AM. You just don’t do that with 40 players, you need more like 400. VS being outnumbered is A BALD FACED LIE.

eiennnoai.9870:

I don’t know, you could try to put 3W advertisment in PvE maps chat, creating a special operation or whatever maybe ? Which is what VS has been doing. There’s no need for more players, just a better %age of people doing 3W in such cases…

OR, we might try to get more people who are actually interested in WvW in the first place, preferably playing in our deserted timezones so that we get better coverage while not getting long queues.
Except if we do we’re the bad guys? Brilliant logic there :/

You do of course realize that overall server population has no strict correlation with WvW server population, don’t you?

Just today I posted several screenshots proving Desolation had the outmanned debuff on at least 2 out of 4 maps (and at 10:30 it was actually happening on all 3 borderlands) for at least a 3 hour period this morning. Where is actual hard proof that Vizunah is being outnumbered? I haven’t seen any so far, just preemptive whining.

Glor.2485:

Actually you loose while outnumbering on average across the day

Screenshots of you being outmanned like I just posted for Deso, or it didn’t happen

tita.6358:

yes we overestimated them. at midnight US time those 400 kids/casuals go to sleep .

So looks like we need more US/Oceanic/Asia players, not less…

about Deso getting the outnumbered debuff on 2 maps all the time at night (or NA prime time). that’s what you get for moving your whole ruin zerg from map to map every 15 minutes to go to undefended doors. we don’t move our whole server when switching map.

Now I’m confused. Wasn’t RUIN able to fill all 4 maps with thousands of players on each map? Why would they need to switch if this was the case?

Jaghen.8314:

I wouldn’t say instantly and easily, but yes VS has a lot of player ready to sacrifice a night (more so during holidays for sure) to ensure a win

It’s not just a night… check the history of the score of this week matchup. We took them by surprise only on tuesday and wednesday; after that, they simply mobilized and more than matched us up the following nights. Out of 7 nights, they were absent on only 2 of them, and that was also when they had built a 15-20k advantage so they probably just grew a bit overconfident. At any other time they had at the very least our numbers and often more.

Great job Vizunah, proving dedication can overcome pure numbers of Desolation and never giving up against overwhelming odds.

LOL… just lol.

Here’s the pure numbers for you:

Approx. 7:30:

DS outmanned on VS map, 7:32:
http://imageshack.us/a/img201/4503/vs732.jpg

DS outmanned on AS map, 7:35:
http://imageshack.us/a/img197/4415/as735.jpg

Approx 8:00:

DS outmanned on AS map, 8:10:
http://imageshack.us/a/img203/761/as810.jpg

Approx 8:30:

DS outmanned on Deso map, 8:26:
http://imageshack.us/a/img100/8953/ds826.jpg

DS outnammend on AS map, 8:28:
http://imageshack.us/a/img811/1373/as828.jpg

Approx 9:00:

DS outmanned on Deso map, 8:59:
http://imageshack.us/a/img542/669/ds859.jpg

Approx 9:30:

DS outmanned on Deso map, 9:29:
http://imageshack.us/a/img26/1633/ds929.jpg

Approx 10:00:

DS outmanned on Deso map, 10:05:
http://imageshack.us/a/img51/8531/ds1005.jpg

Approx 10:30:

DS outmanned on VS map, 10:26:
http://imageshack.us/a/img72/5109/vs1026.jpg

DS oumanned on AS map, 10:30:
http://imageshack.us/a/img801/4803/as1030.jpg

DS outmanned on Deso map, 10:31:
http://imageshack.us/a/img213/6733/ds1031.jpg

And all of this on a friday morning. You can also check the scoring site and see how VS held a 295 points tick this morning at 4:56 AM CET time.

Kudos to VS players, they really organized themselves well and hit us at our traditional weakest point i.e. the early morning, but if anyone had any doubts, it should be painfully clear now that VS is a juggernaut which can instantly and easily mobilize to get full 24/7 coverage on all 4 maps as soon as their victory is in doubt, and whoever is whining about them having only 40 players and asking Arenanet to ban US players from the EU bracket is lying through their theeth and has an extremely obvious agenda.

Gratz to VS for their well deserved victory (minus the whiners among you), and here’s to another week of vicious fights

Gwal.2813:

And 24/7 coverage wasn’t an issue in EU until this…

Oh but IT WAS, believe me, IT WAS.

We got massacred by VS nightcapping force 3 weeks ago when we were kicked out of T1. And we were told to deal with it. Well we did, and look at the whining now. PREEMPTIVE whining even, since you’ve not yet lost and in fact the matchup is incredibly balanced so far.

Apparently, 24/7 is only good if it happens to favor your side. Well you know how the saying goes, right? Live by the sword…

Ceelaniri.8410:

you are off topic.

try answering these questions first:

Why are NA guilds joining english speaking EU servers at all, instead of giving the best for the servers the run from?

Because they correctly realized that to be competitive with this scoring system you need 24/7 coverage and achieving that without horrible queues is only possible if a server has groups from different timezones. And to reach this situation you need NA players on EU servers and EU players on NA servers, which is what is happening and what everyone with half a brain foresaw the instant we had the first week-long matches.
If anything, the weird thing here is that it took so long to start the process.

Ceelaniri.8410:

Why did ANet put up two ladders?

Because they are utterly clueless and didn’t think through what would happen with a 24/7 system having multiple region-split servers instead of just a global one a la EVE.

A french server with the biggest night force ?? Desolation often has 130 players against barely 50 VS the best nights, and PA is often nowhere to be found

If you seriously believe the average night between Deso and VS is 130 vs 50 then there’s no space for rational discussion anymore.

Here are a few fun facts: this night I kept fighting until 6 AM (yeah yeah I know an EU-based Deso player fighting at night? Impossible, right? We all know the nights are the exclusive province of RUIN who can casually bring 1 trillion players to all 4 maps simultaneously completely saturating the queues…).

I was playing in the VS borderland. We kept being attacked (by both servers at first, then by VS only after AS all but disappeared from the map during the night) at our keep having the orb for something like 10-12 hours straight, and this includes all the night until at least 6 AM when I went to bed. At NO TIME during this whole period VS had less than a 40-man zerg to fuel the attack.

Meanwhile (and this was during the 3-6AM period) VS also had enough people to:

- hold half the EB map against the quadrillion RUIN players that as we all know can also all enter the maps regardless of the maximum cap
- instantly recap our own borderland as soon as our forces there had to move (and stay) to VS map to defend the keep due to our dwindling numbers on the map

If we had 130 vs 50 we’d have simply met their 50 with OUR 50 while the remaining 80 people would have capped the rest of the empty maps, left a few scouts around (say 10 on each map), THEN come back to the contested map and crushed them 100 vs 50.

The score speaks clearly enough. Simple fact of the matter is: unless you believe in those mythical 40 tactical supergeniuses university students on permanent week-long vacations which only apply to them and not to AS’ players, and think all of them are multiboxing with 10 accounts each, the empyrical observation makes it extremely clear that VS can bring MASSIVE numbers of players at any time of the day or of the night, and they can keep this going day in day out for the whole week. That’s why they are where they are in the first place, and that’s why the scores are so close. We on Desolation are simply matching their numbers, nothing less, nothing more.

For the first time we have a matchup in EU T1 in which the winner is not a foregone conclusion before wednesday. Are you all already so used to total washouts to feel the need to complain that you MIGHT lose for THE FIRST TIME to an english-speaking server?

The difference here is that the only people that were doing it on our server were us, but we maybe like German are too fairplay.

That difference is meaningless, so is the word “fair play”.

If you wanted real “fair play” (assuming just for the sake of discussion this concept has any meaning in this context, which I think it doesn’t), you’d have setup NO nightcapping, not “ok we nightcap and win by doing PvDoor, but only using people from our country which can afford to not sleep”.

Once you setup a group of let’s say 40 people which give you 2/3 of your points playing unopposed during the night, it’s COMPLETELY OBVIOUS that someone, sooner or later, it’s going to think “hey let’s bring 80 people at night and wreck them”. Then they will be followed by someone else who brings 160, then 320, then 640. Once you reach 666, you’re at the maximum allowed by the game and you reach the equilibrium point, at which time the real fun can start. If you never reach that point, the game fails. HARD.

Second because it is a fact that most player from the main guilds are now waking up at 1h to go to bed at 17h. Primetime becomes extremely weakened thanks to this. Also those waking up at 5h before going to work are getting extremely tired (and have trouble helping for primetime EU one ofc, although nowaday’s primetime seems to be US one…)

Right.
Let’s forget for a moment that RUIN decided to join Desolation in the first place because their members found potential in the server (otherwise they’d have joined someone else) and let’s pretend Desolation is in T1 exclusively due to RUIN.

So what?

Vizunah was the server who first introduced pro-nightcapping into the EU bracket and used it to cruise to auto-victory for week after week. Props to you for being smart about the implications of the scoring system and setting yourself up to exploit it in the best way, but are you now really complaining that someone else took notice and reacted accordingly?

Honestly, what were you expecting? All other EU servers to roll over, die, and let you autowin for all eternity?

Given the current implementation it’s painfully obvious (and it was foreseen by many, myself included) that the system is intrinsically unbalanced and allows even the smallest population difference to snowball into massive points lead. There’s only ONE situation in which it can work: if all 3 servers in a matchup have full 24/7 coverage on all 4 maps.
Now there are two main ways to reach this point:

A) have a server which such a ridiculously overbloated population that people keep queuing at 5 AM out of desperation because it’s the only time they have any hope of skipping the 6-hours long queue
B) have a server with groups from different timezones

Are you really surprised that people are trying to organize to use the B way to setup competitive servers?

Far from spoiling the EU bracket, RUIN are trailblazers. I fully expect (and hope) that we will soon have at least a 25% of US population playing on the EU servers (hopefully on at least 3 different ones, 6 would be even better but I doubt the game has the numbers to do it) and vice-versa for EU players going on NA ones. If you have any brain, you will hope it too, because otherwise the WvW subsystem is DEAD as it will have absolutely NO long term sustainability.

The only other hope would be a massive revamp of the scoring system but Arenanet so far has completely failed to provide it in the 5 months since the first BWE when players pointed the problem to them, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

I don’t think it’s a bug. I think it’s an intended stealth change.

Yesterday I completed it a couple dozen times, never missed the final jump. Today I managed to reach last jump 4 times, all 4 times I didn’t manage to enter the window and I just fell below.
They’ve probably ninja-patched tonight so that you cannot enter anymore if you’ve already completed it. So lame

Sird.4536:

FS were the server to beat in this tier, everything you heard about us before hand was true and I think any server we faced would agree.. On Saturday we showed what we could do by almost dominating WvW, Sunday we did a good job during the afternoon and prime time and felt we gave a good account of ourselves. However waking up on Monday with literally everything blue sapped our energy away.

I think the first part is linked to the second. With 24/7 fights, sustainability of both population and leadership on all 4 maps is required.

You exerted yourselves too much on Saturday as a reaction to our extremely strong Friday night rush (which was a mistake in itself as it left us too weak at the start of the weekend), managed to hold on Sunday but ended up completely exhausted. It wouldn’t have made a difference to the final outcome due to your lack of presence during the night but it did end up compounding the problem.

Simple truth of the matter is no server I’ve seen so far can achieve true 24/7 coverage on all 4 maps at the same time, so focusing all the effort (and the leadership) at one specific point in time is going to make you lose horribly down the line.

Gavello.2813:

tl:dr We aren’t bashing FS, we want them to get better.

Tbh, I think we just got them at their morale low point. Desolation went through the same phase 3 weeks ago, after badly losing 2 matches in a row and realizing we simply didn’t stand a chance against 24/7 coverage.

I look forward to getting at least 3 EU servers with around the clock population; the fights will be epic. The fact remains though that this “solution” is player-based and leaves most of the servers in the dust, and for the game as a whole, this situation is just unacceptable.

SoulstitchMMO.1396:

Please don’t touch this. It is absolutely not your problem to fix if this is happening. This is to be fixed by matchmaking, and proper wvw strategy.

It is NOT difficult to leave spawn and make a push into a map. Eventually matches will be even.

Please do not touch this aspect of the game.

It is a huge design flaw and they should absolutely correct it ASAP.

Right now defending your gains becomes easier the more of the map you control. You can better concentrate your forces, the enemy gets less and less realistic targets to attack, and your supply and logistic lines actually IMPROVE and become EASIER TO MANAGE the bigger your empire is rather than the other way around.

This makes no sense whatsoever in “realistic” terms and makes for a crappy experience in game terms and as such should be drastically changed.

Mesmer portal rush works because people are usually busy being all in the same place attacking something else (most often doors, instead of letting ram operators do it).

Spread around the place, and have people announcing the portal on whatever voice chat program you’re using as soon as they notice it. AoE nuke the portal with everything you’ve got. The enemies will die before even managing to start their attack routine.

Oh and btw: the portal exit renders normally.

I don’t think it’s true (I think the scoring system makes for inherently unstable matches, meaning every small population imbalance snowballs into massive point leads, so the matching system will never work because it will never be able to find servers whose populations are similar enough to provide a close match), BUT, even if it was true, how is this the players’ fault and not Arenanet?

Everyone working in this industry should now know (and should have known since 10-15 years at the very least) that if you hope your game systems will be balanced not because of the way you have designed them but thanks to players’ behavior you are going to be extremely disappointed.

There is no excuse anymore, IMO.

We should actually merge deso and blacktide populations to achieve true 24/7 coverage. Even then we would have some time slots without full 666 coverage as I do not think either Ruin or the russians can field so many at once during their “work shifts”.

This scoring system is so stupid…

ako.8973:

dirty nightcappers versus dirty daycappers

You joke, but this is essentially what’s happening and it’ s incredibly boring. Blech.

Anyway, we at Deso need an asian shift now if we want to compete in T1. Ruin is a powerful addition but the maps in the early mornings of the work days are completely empty, as evidenced by the russians doing the complete 600 points+ capping routine (btw, do you people in Russia never work? I can understand the 3 hours difference but jesus… at 11-12 AM you’re supposed to be at the workplace anyway :P). And we could also use some more people at prime time; I’ve yet to experience a moment, during this whole week matchup, when I could not enter WvW because all 4 maps had queues.

It’s monday. Yesterday was weekend.