Guild Wars 2

kefro.9312:

TC was full on the linking before this one and still got a server link. Now they weren’t full and they got none. So what is the diference now? There is no logic besides the one we were talking about

The logic is that both times (this linking and the last one) the three top rated servers (thus theoretically tier 1 servers) didn’t get a link. This has been done after the feedback from the community that thought it is unfair for 1 of the top 3 servers having a link and others having none, even if arenanet though it needed to balance out the “over the limit”-activity of full servers I just explained.
The matchmaking-system just didn’t put the top 3 servers in tier 1 this time.

the three most active servers (thus tier 1 servers) didn’t get a link. There is no “full” server that did get a link in current matchup.

If there are several full servers (so for example 4 servers with an activity that is too high and thus leads to a lot of queues on the servers), then they will still be different in how much over the “limit” the servers perform. So if a lot of pve players on Blackgate go to wvw and start playing even if it is full, then this server will clearly outperform the opponents. This has to be addressed with linkings as well. We only see “full” but in reality even full servers can have different levels of activity and this has to be balanced.

I always asked myself if this is a bug or if it is meant to work this way. I also suspect it to be intentional.
Did we get an official statement about this?

SkyShroud.2865:

It is a matter of fairness and balance. Putting a high server with obvious higher population with 2 other medium servers, it is very highly possible it have combined higher population than others.
While HOD is winning skirmish by a very very small margin, the overall PPT is losing to DB.
Regardless, the links are highly questionable. I have doubt in anet team capability to analyse data.

Night, I love you man, but if the servers are that close together as we are now in PPT, then it obviously is not a highly questionable link. It shows that if a server is “high” or “medium” in population (number of players) doesn’t show the wvw population adequately and thus isn’t used by arenanet to calculate the activity in wvw. HoD has a lower population, but very active players, guilds and commanders, DB is struggling to keep people active after weeks of being bashed into the ground. In some timezones HoD will be outnumbered (and I am aware that your timezone is one of them) in others, DB will be overrun, that’s normal for servers with coverage gaps. I suspect arenanet uses the participation-gain per server in last weeks to measure how good a server is for the linking and imho this is the easiest way to make sure the linkings are fair. And I think if the points in a matchup are 60, 63, 55 K PPT like in the HoD, DB, CD matchup, then it is kind of unfair to say that it isn’t balanced. How much more balanced can it be?

Now IF DB wakes up and players start to play again, then it is possible that DB will be clearly stronger than HoD or CD, and I also expect this to happen like with YB (to a lesser degree), but I think Arenanet has to do their linkings depending on the activity they see, based on hard data and not on theoretical calculations of how the activity could develop in the future. Because such calculations can never be reliable enough.

I don’t see the issue either. The three strongest servers in wvw-activity got no link and the three after that got a small link that will not really make a big difference. While some may not agree on arenanets selection of the “strongest” servers, I am sure they took into account a lot of data that we cannot see.

@Skyshroud (Night? Dijory here.): DB in its current state really isn’t comparable to any tier1 server. They have a good sea-coverage, but we both have seen them without link the last weeks and have seen their numbers implode during eu-times for example. I think the matchup is quite balanced, DB received better links because of their tanking the last few weeks, but both HoD and CD can beat them. If they still had no link then they would just be dead last again for the next weeks to come and they have seen enough of that lately

I also tend to have a “attack me and I will defend myself” policy in such situations and try to avoid them, if I can. In my experience they usually attack me though and this could be, because they think, I am avoiding them out of fear. In groups, we usually call new players out and sometimes we avoid them if we can.
I feel bad for those players, because I really don’t want to ruin their fun in wvw but most of the time they really don’t stand a chance in small scale battles against veterans that played the game for many years. Especially when you see them on vanilla classes or pve builds.

Yes, tomes can already be consumed for spirit shards. So there is no problem at all, it can already be converted into a more or less useful currency.

Not every class is viable in every situation in wvw and necromancers are more useful in zerg-builds in zergs.
Reapers are ok as havok in some builds, not as good as a thief, but nothing is as good in havok as a thief. If you are getting focustargeted everytime in small groups, organize your gameplay (wells and marks at your feet) build (sustain, plague) or your group (invis, perma retal etc) around it.

SkyShroud.2865:

Anet continues to link servers with zero desire to balance them equally, they continue using their balance within tiers approach.

How would you make the linking to make that better? I think the current system is the closest solution to balance out servers within tiers AND between tiers. OF course the first priority is to keep it balanced in the tiers themselves, so matchups will be balanced, but I am sure tier 2 servers will do ok in tier 1 and tier 4 servers will do ok in tier 3 as well.

DB lost a lot of coverage. It is true that they are likely to go up in tiers later, but if arenanet only takes into account the amouth of activity in wvw in the last month or so, then it is clear that DB became a tier4 server and thus is entitled to 2 links.

I think this is a very reasonable linking that seems to have done depending on wvw-population/activity instead of Glicko rank (otherwise Maguuma and YB would have no link). Don’t forget ET is a very minor link for Maguuma, it will not help them against Blackgate if they don’t play better as well.

I myself play mostly WvW and I do understand that people want to play only the parts of the game that they enjoy. There are also a lot of pve-players that don’t want to do the gift of battle rewardtrack in WvW, because they don’t enjoy WvW. And most PvE-players also don’t enjoy some forms of PvE like fractals or raids etc.

But let us not forget: the only time you need to do those things like world completion is for legendaries. Those are the most expensive and hard to get weapons and pieces of equipment in the game. And as such it makes sense, that you have to play all gametypes and invest a lot to get them. In my opinion they should not make it easier to get them, they should make it harder.

But of course I would like unique wvw skins and more uses for the proofs, I just don’t think it would qualify as “legendary” enough to get everything you need for your legendaries just by playing WvW.

The funny thing about this post is that you just informed me and many other wvw guys with 40’000+ badges on how to make them into money. Let’s see how fast the price can drop and how long your calculations are true..

If you have the task to kill 10’000 invaders or capture 1000 keeps, this would be
a) not equaly difficult depending on what server you are on
b) in a zerg not need any skill or contribution from yourself other than tagging and standing in a circle.
So while it may be comparable in time and grind work to get legendaries through wvw instead of raids, it would clearly not be comparable in needed skill and it wouldn’t be fair to many servers and lead to bandwagoning.

I love your idea about armorpieces (or weapons for that matter) that react with optical effects on kills/killstreaks. Would be a very cool thing for very very rare armors. That’s an idea that shouldn’t be buried in a topic like this one to be honest.

I think if the cannons count to the siege cap, then they are an interesting alternative to current siege. If you have 4 sup catas on one door istead of 4 cannons you also cannot build. If you have 4 cannons firing on a choke or 4 sup arrowcarts: that zerg is going to die.
I think it is also an interesting and fast option to take out defending siege in some places.

The ones unhappy with cannons: stay constructive and say why you don’t like it and how it is going to be fixed, instead of bashing and whining. This isn’t the american presidential election.

I am really happy about this as well! Thank you Arenanet! It saves so much time!

While I see why people want legendary armor just by playing wvw, I don’t think playing wvw is “legendary” enough. There is no difficulty in running with the zerg and just being on a lot. Raids are very difficult, a lot more so than wvw and there is no way for arenanet to make wvw the same high difficulty for everyone.

And why do we need legendary armor? Everyone gets their ascended armor already. Legendary is just for showing off.
Furthermore legendary armor would give people a reason to bandwagon to a server where it is easier to farm it. So it is kind of ironic how people whine about the few bandwagoning we have right now while wanting to create reasons for it to become a big thing.

I would be for new unique skins in wvw though. Maybe something that has increasing chance to drop on high level rankups? At the moment a higher rank in wvw is a bad thing, because you get focused a lot and you cannot hide it. And the people in your zerg don’t see it. There is nothing to balance it out atm.

In NA that is mostly what they did. T1 didn’t get a link, T2 had very small links that should have no impact on numbers and T3 had a small link and T4 had two bigger servers and a smaller one. For Europe it was more complicated. But if you tell them they are allowed to link servers with different languages then it might work as well as in NA.

Vitality was intended to be the stat to reduce condition damage effectiveness. Additionally there is condition clear (as an up to 100% reduce of condition damage on you), then there is the boon “resistance” that negates all condis. Furthermore there are foods that reduce condition duration and countless skills and traits against conditions/condition effectiveness etc.
They actually make a lot of effort to balance conditions to power making it a viable option for wvw as well. Of course there are 1:1-situations, where conditions are very effective but in most cases it seems balanced well enough imho. Granted, condi thief and condi mesmer are classes I find very hard to counter, but I am not good in 1:1 anyway.

I think it is just until people are used to teamchat and realize it is mostly for emergencies. Many people haven’t noticed, that one chat is for all maps and one just for the map they are on, so mistakes happen. It’s not that bad in lower tiers though and I personally even like to read the occasional chat between heavy fights as a distraction. Additionally on my server many of those conversations are hilarious.

it’s a bit like give them the finger and they want the hand. With the reward tracks wvw now is actually really worth playing. We can even make legendaries without ever having played dungeons.

I would of course like everything, they add to wvw, make wvw exclusive skins etc, but I think we don’t really need legendary armor in wvw. Raids are very very difficult, a difficulty that cannot be “produced”/controlled in wvw. I don’t think it would be fair to get a legendary just by playing the game in zergs/guild groups like I do and I don’t think I need it. Legendaries are only cosmetical and we are already able to change the stats on our ascended armor if we so chose. And it is incredibly cheap to do so.

I love the server linking and it brings the activity back to tier 3 and 4 that was gone for a while on the affected servers. There are more tags and I see more and more new players also trying out the gamemode.
I agree that in EU the linking was more problematic because they didn’t want to link servers with different languages and then the matchmaking wasn’t optimal.

The people moving from NA to EU are a small portion of roamers that don’t want high populated maps. And it is perfect for them, as NA primetime is in the middle of the night for EU, so they find rather empty maps that allow them to play the game the way they want to. I think this is a perfect solution for them.

I am happy that boon duration is addressed, as it is one of the things that were inbalanced with the Quickness, Resistance and Protection-stacking.
Especially Naturalistic Resonance was one of the skills that is hugely out of balance with the implementation of boon duration as an armor effect with “concentration”, because the 50% boon duration people get equals 750 skillpoints if you try to get the same amouth of boon duration through concentration. So 5 people get 750 skillpoints with 100% uptime through revenenant, while other classes usually have option to give 150 skillpoints in combat only (spotter, strength in numbers…).
The adaption of the mesmer with adding fixed duration also is a logical step in the right direction, just as the corrupt boon-options always add the condition with a fixed duration. To have corruption make the condition being the same duration as the boon was, would just have “escalated” the situation imho. Mesmers are still indispensable in zergs with Veil (as is still not limited to 5-10 people only like everything else), Portal and Alacrity for speeding up siege. No other class has access to those unique skills.

I am also happy about the other change with the druid. I am not sure if this will make the druid a more balanced opponent in 1:1 (atm most people agree that druids are overpowered in small scale), but it surely will make them less of a “toss” in zergs as soon as commanders realize their healing potential if some druids actually go the healing route.

Rewards for wvw are very good atm and if you play a lot of wvw, then you will get enough ascended armor and weapon chests. With the current gold earned from wvw you can also buy the materials to buy ascended armor fast enough as well.

WvW-rankup-chests look a bit slim atm compared to the reward tracks though. I would like to see a weaponset/armorskinset that is exclusive for wvw and can drop off the wvw-rankup-chests (higher chance with higher ranks) and small adaptations to the rankup-chests to make them worthwhile (guaranteed rare for example, more sinks for the exclusive rankup materials). If reward tracks have to be toned down for this to be implemented, then I would be fine with that.

I am against big prices for winning the matchup, as it would give people a reason to transfer to winning servers. I am also against high monetary rewards, as the average wvw player plays the game so much that giving them more money would make the game more boring for them when trying to achieve their goals like a legendary.

to recap:

WvW-queues: Make queue visible for the map you are on, so you know, if you can switch characters/maps.

Targeting: All bosses in WvW (supervisors etc.), marked targets in groups/squads, Champions in pve, Excalted explosive in AB south, commander-tags, apple-tags: if there is a zerg around a target, it is impossible to target it. So make it so that those important opponents have a sign above their head and that we can actually click on the target-sign, the boss-sign above the head of somebody etc. to target the boss/target.

Open all bags: if you have a stack of bags and chests etc. make it so that we can right-click -open them all until there is no bag-space left. Others have suggested it before

Commander-squads:
—> Increase the number of people that can be in a squad to 70 (important for wvw)
—> Increase the scaleability of the squad making it possible to make the squadinfo smaller, so it is easier to show the whole squad on 900 pixel height resolutions as well.
—> If I leftclick on someone in the squadwindow or chatwindow also select him as a target, so we can see buffs and boons and make him visible on the map if you selected him so you know where he is.
—> Give us options to color in players of a certain guild in the squad-overview. When running wvw it is hard to know your guild players from pugs.
—> make lieutenants and the commander visible with a color or sign as well even in big squads.

Add new and dyable underwear to the gemstore. We would rarely be able to show them off, but I am sure it would be a welcome present for friends and foes (swimming pants, borat-suit, full-body-suit, toddler-sleeping-suits, diapers, sleeping dresses, bikinis and tasteful lingerie for women etc.).
The asuran nappies really aren’t acceptable. If you want us to be able to show them off more often, give us more diving googles in public places. Plus add a public “pool” in Lions Arch near the mystic forge where you automaticly change to your underpants when you go swimming there.

I think it would be better for the next expansion to actually add Quaggan and Skritt to the playable races and make an alternative story for this races that differs from the main story of the other classes and shows funny and unexpected sidestories to the main storyline or living story content. I think it would be too big a thing to “waste” on a free update. To avoid having to adapt all the armors to the new models there would have to be new costumes for them though.
With the popularity of the Quaggan I would imagine, that they would sell a lot of characterslots and make a ton of gems with different hats and costumes in the gemstore.

You should go trooper-runes for more condi-removal in the zerg if you are running a lot of shouts if you aren’t in a boonshare-group imho.

just don’t follow commanders that don’t want you around. In the current wvw-game usually numbers decide. Commanders that are too picky with who they want to have with them will just lose their numbers and thus the fights. I also understand that rangers/druids may have to leave the squad, if it is full and if I have to decide who gets stability, then it usually are druids/rangers/thieves last (because I just assume they will not push with the zerg), but of course they can still be helpful in zergfights if they play their role well.

Just play what you like and how you like. And if a commander tells you what to play just tell him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbfVd2bqFXg

Jacion.6302:

[…] the system, the infrastructure, the backbone in which guilds transfer, guillds/servers buy out transfers and bandonwagoning is control by the game creators.

Well, the game doesn’t directly allow you to transfer gems, to directly pay fees, money transactions are only possible in strong limitations. Of course the game allows transfers between servers. But again: do you actually propose, that arenanet should stop people from changing servers if someone wants to join his friends on another server? What is your proposition that would have solved the problem for DB?

Of course arenanet does have a slight income through transfers, I personally doubt that anyone pays actual money for it though. Most WvW players play the game so much that they don’t have to spend actual money on the game anymore. And I also think that the community vastly overestimates both the number and the effect of transfers and “bandwagoning”, while it mostly are just fairweather-players not playing when you lose/when the commanders don’t play. While I agree with arenanet controlling linking, matchups, Glicko etc. I don’t think that arenanet does things that make you want to transfer at all and certainly didn’t in DBs case. Most imbalances in wvw are actually caused by other players/the community that have nothing to do with arenanet and all I see them doing is trying to bend the system in a way to make balanced matchups again. But of course there are things that could be made better, I also think Glicko should be improved for example.

I think “blaming” arenanet to play the system so you have a reason to transfer and give them money is both paranoid and unfair.
—> If they wanted us to transfer servers to give them money they would have implemented a serious reward for winning the tier. This small change would have serious impacts and give people a reason to actually care about winning.
—> With the linkings you can be on a dead server and still get active wvw matches. This takes away a reason to transfer off small servers.

I don’t think arenanet could make a system that actually encourages players less to transfer. You just pay money and have no advantage at all. As you will soon see, because fights in tier 4 are fun

I agree that mobility probably wasn’t intended for breaking out of combat after you are engaged and that some classes have too much mobility that can be used to get out of combat instead of just “out of reach” of melee weapons. Since I don’t think Arenanet will address it (otherwise they would have adapted GS-warrior a long time ago): just take it as a victory everytime a daredevil can do nothing else than run from you with his tail between his legs after his bursts failed.

The only people that are really brave are the ones still running vanilla (non-HoT) builds outside of zergs. Everyone else shouldn’t complain too much about builds being too strong and think about all the poor free-to-play-players they bash with their HoT-builds.

@Xenesis
NSP may be strong in tier 4 atm, but the linkings were balanced. Go back in wvw millenium and check the first matches with the linkings. I would think NSP has a lot of fair-weather players and new players on the linked servers that join in the blob and just mobilised their players better than other servers. They also have gotten a few transfers in the last week or two, CD and HoD also couldn’t mobilise enough players on their linked servers. Nothing Arenanet could have done about that.

NSP will be strong in tier 3 as well, they have a good overall coverage and it are 3 servers, SBI and SoS only have small linkups.

@Jacion I don’t think that “getting bought” is that big a thing. Are you saying that all the guilds that transfered from DB were just “bought” by rich servers that play “pay-to-win” instead of the fact that they actually wanted to leave the server on their free will?
- If a guild is loyal to a server, then it will refuse transfer-offers.
- If a guild recieves a transfer-offer, then this is an offer by another player. This has nothing to do with arenanet, transfer offers aren’t something provided by Arenanet.
- DB players can make transfer-offers as well.
- Buying guilds/players doesn’t buy you loyality. This players and guilds will just hop servers again with the next chance they get.
- Like it was said in this topic: many guilds left DB not because of money, they left it because they didn’t want to be tier1 at first and others didn’t want to stay behind on a dead server in a high tier (because Glicko didn’t react fast enough DB was stuck in impossible matchups for several weeks).
- Everybody saw the guilds leave DB, it was no hidden secret. It also isn’t something illegal in any way, people are free to leave to other servers if they want to.

I think blaming Arenanet is unfair in this case, there isn’t much they could have done in the current system to avoid people leaving DB. They could have ajusted the Glicko rating faster, relegating DB earlier but would that have solved DB when they would have went from tier 1 directly to tier 3 or 4?

I understand that you are angry. But I think you should be angry at the guilds leaders that left DB in a hurry and the community that couldn’t stick together for longer. And then mobilize the people that are still on DB and show the guys that transfered to other servers what DB is made off and kick our behinds in wvw, making them feel sorry for leaving. I am sure with the next linking in a few weeks you will have a “resurrection” similar to YB.

YB in tier 1: Why should a game get boring if people are actually trying to play the system? Try to find a way around it by defending, by guessing where they go and ambush them. If they maphop they can only come from uncontested waypoints, so why is it so hard to find them and fight them?

@Jacion the system atm gives no reason for guilds to leave a server. They have to pay for leaving a server and get nothing back if they do (as there is no reward for winning). So if they leave a server they do this because they want to pay for going to a different environment, this has nothing to do with Arenanet. They cannot forbid guilds to leave if they want to, or should they?
I am not saying you should have paid guilds for staying. I am saying that a community has options to keep them on their server. It is important to have an active server community that cannot just be replaced, to have loyal guilds and to have important people that can hold a community together. While all of this requires a lot of work of the community, this things cannot be provided by Arenanet. YB didn’t “disband” when they went to tier 4, they all just did take a break. I think it is similar with DB. And if not, then they are back to the population they had half a year ago before a lot of guilds joined DB when it moved up the ranks.

@Jacion you realise, that it wasn’t Arenanets fault that your guilds left DB? The community should have done something to keep their guilds on the server. That a server falls apart like this is rather rare and I think DB is not dead at all, just has a lot of players that do not play much atm. YB went from t1 —> t4 as well and then woke up without many transfers and now is back in t1.

Adjustments: I understand why they did the adjustments they did in Glicko and I am sure that NSP can also win t3. But for me it is still not clear why there is a chance involved if you know a server belongs in a certain tier to make matches balanced. If you need to manually adjust the tiers to make matches balanced, then just do so and cut the “chance” to get hugely inbalanced matches altogether.

Linkings: if tier 1 and tier 2 have no linkings, then it is likely that tier 3 servers with a link would dominate tier 2. Arenanet has to think about servers breaking out of their tier as well, so it makes sense to have tier 1 without link, small links for tier 2 (so they compete with tier 1 if they end up there), medium links for tier 3 and 2 similarly big servers for tier 4 in NA. I think the current linking in NA were a perfect choice and it wasn’t the fault of the linkings if some matches were unbalanced in NA. Arenanet couldn’t know that DB would implode and YB would wake up like that.
For europe they need to start linking servers with different languages to make it balanced.

Isn’t the very definition of “roaming” NOT to stay in the same place? If you do that,
a) there is less of a risk that a zerg appears just to kill you (you can still meet zergs with other objectives as you though)
b) if there really are some people hunting you, you make it a lot harder for them to find and kill you, thus giving your server an advantage because those people will not be able to do something else then.

Are you sure that wasn’t patched? When I tried it a few weeks ago there were no wolves until the owner (and thus the whole party) was rabbits.
It was an annoying achievement to get, that’s for sure. But it is theoreticly possible not to die as much if you are in the right rotation with attacks and evades. I still died a lot though.

The HoT points do award 10 times the points of the ones in central Tyria. So they should be 10 times as hard to get, right? Are they? Almost all of them can be soloed and for the others I usually had to wait a few minutes until someone came and helped me out (NA server). I never even had to use LFG or guild chat but I helped out guildies a few times.

I think the problem is that we expect map completion to be a solo activity, because it was before HoT, but why should it be? Why not mix things up a little? It is a multiplayer game after all.

There is also no reason to separate armor into 6 pieces instead of making it one set, but that is how the game was designed.
Removing the breather at this point would be frustrating for all the guys that already have the ascended breathers and it really isn’t an issue to get a breather if you want to and runes are very cheap anyway. It is just one more thing you can have to make your character perfect and while it is as useless as ascended/legendary underwater weapons it is one more thing people can work towards if they already played the game for 2000+ hours and still want to optimize their character.

Don’t know why changing stats is restricted for the new ones. To me that makes no sense as well.

Svarty.8019:

• I would advise against developing a system to award more Warscore for holding higher tier objectives as this will reward an already dominant world.

Totally agree. The server that holds the objective already has the advantage that tier 3 structures are a lot harder to take than paper ones and have better or strategical upgrades (watchtower, waypoint). This is more than enough reason to try not to lose it.

I agree with the ones that said merging server does not solve the problems. What problems do people think that would solve?
—> It just alienates small communities more than the linking did.
—> It doesn’t solve transfer: people will still transfer to the server they want to. And I think it is fine that they are able to.
—> Population differences aren’t solved, some servers will still have more players. I would be very interested in the numbers of transfers on population, because I think the transfers aren’t a big factor in creating population differences at all. I know only very few people that transfered (I don’t know any bandwagoner at all). People just see more players on a enemy server and think it is transfers, while those increases and decreases are in reality caused by players playing more when they are winning and playing less when they are losing (“hybernating” servers). But can you really tell me guilds with a lot of players that did transfer to a winning servers linkup? How many? How often did they transfer?
Sure some guilds transfer, but they always did and did it before linkups, but I have seen more guilds transfer AWAY from tier 1 (DB) to tier 2 and 3 than the other way around.

I still think linking is a great choice and did a lot to make matchups better. It’s the matchmaking-system and slow reacting Glicko (additionaly to refusing to link servers with different languages- something I don’t understand) that did create inbalanced matchups. It isn’t the linking.
Reducing linking-time to 1 month just makes it harder for communities to work together. 2 month is a good middle-ground.

About “testing” new systems on us: please don’t. Do the maths, you have all the statistics you need to think ideas through. Only give us a vote on system that will work on addressing the current problems the wvw community has. Like solving inbalanced matchups or slow reacting matchmaking system.

You would have paid 100 dollars in total for a game that gave you 4 years of constant upgrades, a huge world, interesting stories, dungeons, fractals, raids, guild stuff, wvw, pvp, jumping puzzles.. something people spend 1000ends of hours on and still don’t get bored. Most similar games have a subscription fee and after 4 years you would have paid close to 1000 dollars for it, most games from other genres cost 50 dollars and give you an average of 8 hours of playtime. I understand, if someone thinks 50 dollars is a lot for an “expansion” if you haven’t seen the new content (story, raids, new maps are huge and multi-leveled, no comparison to other maps, new class, new legendaries, new elite class-upgrades, new wvw map, etc.) but for this game it really isn’t. It’s 50 dollars for a new game and more stuff is still to come.

In my country if you go and eat out you pay 100 dollars for 3 people (wine not included) for one evening and one meal. GW2 is a lot of evenings, but then again I am still hungry for more…

I think the polls are actually a good thing. But maybe the contents of the polls should only include suggestions that actually solve the problems the community has. So don’t give us 1 up/1 down systems as an option if you see that it creates even more inbalanced matchups. For NA the matches are more or less balanced if the three servers belonging to a tier are in there. If one of those moves up to be farmed and one moves down to farm, this inbalances every single matchup every second week to a huge degree.
So make a quality check beforehand, do the maths and give us systems to vote for that actually are able to solve the problems the majority of the WvW community is angry about (instead of making bad things even worse). I think inbalanced matchups are quite high on this list atm.

1 /-1 /-1 would currently lead to rankings like Maguuma 8 / YB 1 / Blackgate 0, every server that doesn’t win more than 50% of all skirmishes will have 0 points, so most balanced matchups will be 1/0/0 in total points at the end and the winner being the one that won the last matchup before reset. Would be funny but would it be better?

But if Vabbi I is full, then additional guild memers wouldn’t be able to join there and you couldn’t join your friends. Also wouldn’t that lead to lots of wvw maps with drastically reduced number of players per map? What if no server is able to fill up their “team” with 20 players? What do you do with those additional players that also want to play?

I think the population imbalance has to be addressed but it already is through linkings and matchmaking. It just has to adapt faster.

About nightcapping: In the old system during primetime you had the effect of kills on ppt that surpassed the structure ppt. In the victory point system primetime victory points are the same as nighttime victory points, thus making a server that is 1st in primetime and 3d during the night because of nightcapping very likely to lose more points in new system as in old one as long as the “Action level” system (or hopefully a more flexible version of it) isn’t implemented.

Scores aren’t closer together at all if you look at them in percentages or how fast those points could be earned. Victory points are just a lower number but effective scores are further apart.

If you want zergfights, you can just contact the commander on that server and see, if he is willing to fight. Some servers regularly have commanders of enemy servers that actually have a diplomatic relationship, make “organised” zergfights and exchange taunts etc. and I think this is great. If a server is outnumbered, then it will not fight fairly or only with siege and that is understandable.

Tongku: I partly agree, players need incentives to stay. For me it is serverpride/“defending” your friends. Outnumbered gameplay will always lead to you losing the ppt and victory points, no matter how many points a kill will give to your server. Discouraging players that have lot of population on their side to play outside a megablob because they lose 10x the ppt if they die also isn’t the right way to go imho. I would rather see a small increase in personal rewards by giving +25 points on the reward track if you are outnumbered. Personal rewards is a better incentive than ponts that will not matter for fighting in a lost matchup.

@Belenwyn
EOTM has a serverindepended system and blowouts still happen. Additionally this really would destroy any serverpride left, any guilds and anyone that would like to run wvw with friends. I would like to know what your motivation is to play WvW Belenwyn.

Servers in a matchup have to have similar population, on this we agree. For this we have the linkings and the matchmaking system that should look for this to happen.

I agree with that the victory point system change is irrelevant as long as the matchmaking system isn’t fixed and blowout matches happen.
The victory point system didn’t solve the issues that originally should have been fixed by them. Matches are further apart instead of closer together and decided by mid week with no way of catching up for the servers behind. Coverage is even more important than before, prime time players and kills are devaluated by making prime-time wins the same points as night-capping.

How to make it better?
—> Solve the EU linking problem by making a vote on those servers about linking servers with different languages.
—> Address the matchmaking system to something that reacts faster on population differences and creates better balanced matchups by reducing the chance of blowout matches.
—> Implement the changes you wanted to do to make the victory point system “better” in the first place: Last stand and population/“activity”-dependend raise in victory points. I don’t agree on all the means that you planned for the changes, but they will lead to at least a chance for servers in the back to catch up (although it is very unlikely) and to make prime-time players comparably important to off-time-players.
—> When a skirmish ends there is no notificiation or way to find out how the last skirmish ended and it what place your server was in/how close it was. Give us some way to find out (reward that states the rank? Notification on screen like bloodlust for example).

Merging is a bad idea without having the server agreeing to this merge. If you want to go to another server, then move there. Linking works great and merging wouldn’t solve any of the issues we have. People that don’t have any connection to the server they are on would still move to winning servers.

1up ,1down is NOT a good matchmaking system, it will lead to blowout matches more often, because if there is a difference between the tiers, then moving up or down a tier will always lead to blowout. Just go back in history and apply 1up/1down and think it through how tiers would look like. Servers may actually start to fight for running second instead of first, if they get blown out of the water in the higher tier.

We need a better matchmaking system than Glicko, one that reacts faster and gives less randomness creating blowout matches and the easiest way is to make manual matchups that include Glicko as a factor but also other variables. If you know a server cannot handle a specific tier, why even giving it a chance to land in that tier.
But I am sure it isn’t hard to watch past matchups and just tweek the formulas to make the system better if you really need to have an automatic system.