Guild Wars 2

morrolan.9608:

Glass Hand.7306:

I’ve gone through matches with the new scoring system playing as both the top server in T3 and now am playing bottom on T2. I didn’t notice any particular focusing on us when we were on top, and now when on the bottom the 2nd place is showing no interest in cooperating with us against the 1st place server. Furthermore the 2-1-1 scoring eliminates any point incentive to try to finish 2nd in a skirmish – the first place server is so dominant first place is not likely ever in any skirmish for us this week.

Spending time on this approach is a failure – it is simply not addressing the real issues of population balance and population decline in this game mode.

Why should there be an incentive to play for second? That leads to 3rd place server being focussed. As for spending time I agree so then why whinge about it.

Because some servers are weak, and playing for 2nd is the best they can do. If they place 2nd in a skirmish, that’s a psychological win for them and also, if they end up placing 2nd, that’s a huge win in their glicko rating. This is especially true for very weak servers who get transferred up due to a random roll.

I don’t think you know what role playing means.

Etienne.3049:

Spurnshadow.3678:

What? Those are all dramatically different. The only thing that you posted that’s the same is 321 and 15,10,5

BTW, guys, you can never have 210 cause that would drop the bottom server, if it’s very weak and almost never places 2nd, off the glicko chart.

If it leads to the same outcome (that is, which position the servers end) I can’t see any relevant difference. Looking at it that way I’ve only mentioned 2 different ones, 2,1,0 (and variations) and 1,0,0 (and variations), you can multiply those by whatever you want and add whatever you want and the outcome will remain the same.

I’m sure they can find some way to modify the scores for the glicko thing only (as I’ve suggested twice in the bit you quoted).

Holy kitten. What the kitten do i have to do to get you guys to stop looking at the numbers and saying it leads to the same outcome. IT CHANGES PEOPLES BEHAVIOR. So, it will not lead to the same outcome as people will play differently.

Since DBL came out, there’s been a lot of ideas on what to do with this middle area. I think it’s more relevant now since they deactivated the oasis, and it would spice up WvW a bit.

Here’s mine:

Add a waypoint which is inactive. In order to activate it, there would be three capture points a decent distance away that would need to be held, like bloodlust. I think it would be op for it to always be up. So, instead of it being on all the time until someone else takes it away, have it on a 15 minute decay, then it goes inactive again. This would give something more and impactful for small groups to do, and alleviate some of the complainers about how it’s a pain to get around the map.

Etienne.3049:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

How is 5,4,3 different than 3,2,1?
Since there has been a lot of debate on this, with most people being right but debating different points, there are three things that are true:

1. The scores will be closer.

The absolute difference stays the same. And as you admit the “closer” scores don’t matter for the outcome, how is a smaller relative difference relevant?
Not that the absolute difference matters either, you could make it 15,10,5 and there’d still be no actual difference whatsoever. Any scoring of [2n+m],[n+m],[m] will give you the exact same result, really.

If you want it for matchmaking, isn’t there some way you could accomplish that withoutgiving every team 216 points for free?

And if you really want to go with 5,4,3, why not give every team 216 points up front and then reward 2,1,0? It’d lead to exactly the same result ony it’d let people see what 5,4,3 actually means (it being the exact same as 3,2,1, that is).

And since you’re sort of asking for alternative scoring suggestions I’d suggest 2,1,0, or 1,0,0 (I haven’t played that long enough to find out if it really matters), or anything where the 3rd place gets 0 points really. (I mean only for the displayed scores, if the matchmaking would be better with higher scores just add those in any way that doesn’t show in the score.)

What? Those are all dramatically different. The only thing that you posted that’s the same is 321 and 15,10,5

BTW, guys, you can never have 210 cause that would drop the bottom server, if it’s very weak and almost never places 2nd, off the glicko chart.

Zenith.6403:

Dawdler.8521:

Hahahaha… I dont think you have been reading the same things we have. It’s disliked by almost everyone. That’s not exactly a mixed response.

Who is this “everyone”? Everyone who comes to complain to forums? Certainly not the players who are enjoying the game by actually playing it and seeing the merits of the system, namely closer and more interesting matchups that aren’t about ganging up on the weakest server.

I think I can count five people on the forums who’ve been in favor of 211. A few others who don’t care. Eveyone else thinks it’s crap. Keep in mind that there are tons, tons of people who just don’t come on the forums and bother to post. Sure they play, but they’re suffering through this crap. Lots of people just flat out stop playing.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Thanks for the feedback everyone. The response to 2,1,1 is mixed, so I thought I would inform everyone that we will be changing it to 5,4,3. This is intended to go out around the same time as Episode 4.

Thanks so much for responding. I also thank y’all for considering and implementing a 543 system. Like others have said, anything is better than 211. Any idea of when Episode 4 is coming around?

OriOri.8724:

How is 5, 4, 3 any different from 3, 2, 1? In the end, the server in third place will be 2 points behind the server in first place, and 1 point behind the server in 2nd place for every skirmish in those positions. After 10 skirmishes with the same results, the third place server will still be 20 points behind the first place server.

How is this any better than 2, 1, 1?

The psychology and strategy is totally different. If take the same skirmish placements, translate them to 543 (owr whatever point value you create), yes, you will still get the same placements. However, under a different scoring system, people play totally different, so making a direct numerical comparison is illogical.

Svarty.8019:

I get the impression that the numbers are largely irrelevant at the moment -

• first place is often determined before the game begins, or shortly afterwards,
• with 211, third place can come 2nd due to one lucky nightcap period,
• even if there were some way to stop one gorilla server winning nearly every skirmish and the other two fighting over 1 nightcap over the entire week, most players aren’t too fussed about winning or losing except that they don’t want to fall so far down “the ladder” that they become a gorilla server themselves – an occurrance that has disappeared into the mists of obscurity due to the “good fights” ideology behind the linking system.

Those are my thoughts. I hope they made sense.

The numbers are super relevant. First, and most importantly, they dictate strategy and overall psychology. Secondly, they are a better reflection of server strength. 3 servers in a match should have 3 different scores, not 2. The fact that you, and others are calling the current scoring system somewhat irrelevant is a huge problem. Third, it effects glicko.

OK, so I want to address a criticism that I’ve seen pop up here and on some other threads:

211 makes it easier for people to come back as the 3rd place server is not as far behind as they’d be under the 321 system. This is false.

First of all, if you’re a “third place server,” then you will most likely never place first in a skirmish. It might happen if the other two are asleep. At least in 321, you might place 2nd which is a win in of itself, and improves your glicko. That doesn’t happen under 211.

“It keeps the matches from being run-away for the 3rd place server”

Uh, yeah, but it’s totally made up. Sure, they’re in the same position as the stronger 2nd place server, but they’re still too weak to win. Why are we punishing the whole system in order to make the 3rd place server feel better? That’s irrational.

Yes, they are closer to the 2nd place server, but do you think the stronger 2nd place server will put up with that? No. They’ll just win a skirmish or two at some point throughout the week, in order to place 2nd. It’s total BS that the 3rd place server still gets nearly the same score and the same glicko adjustments.

If you think that it’s better because the 3rd place server is only 1/2 (50%) way behind now whereas before, they were 1/3 (33%) of the way behind, so what? If that was really a big deal for you, then there are other solutions, for example, a 543 scoring system. For those of you who find basic math difficult, that’s 60% behind first.

I never had too much of an issue with the 321 scoring system. My biggest criticism was that it was not that reflective of a servers efforts. I’ve always thought it should be 543 as that would closer reflect the efforts of a server’s war score.

Thread kinda got derailed talking about negative/positive feedback. I agree with the criticism, though. The issue is that when a good change is made, there are lots of folks who come to the forums and say, “hey, that’s great,” or “good job!” But they did it, so should we go on congratulating them every week?

It’s also unrealistic for me to make a post outlining all the positive changes I’ve seen over the last year before providing negative feedback on an ongoing issue that is effecting WvW.

But in light of your post, here are some things off the top of my head without spending too much time:

Squad UI
Scouting participation
Reward tracks
Proof of Heroics Vendor
Portable provisioner
5 minute “scouted” debuff after taking an objective.
Sentries having more importance
Watchtower
Unlinking supply to upgrades while getting rid of the automatic ugrade (that took way too long to rectify. We lost a lot of players to this delay)
Putting forth a lot of effort into the DBL to improve the map (great changes, like adding all the little steps, improving flow, but again, took way too long and lost a lot of players from this)
Gathering nodes
Skirmishes to even out scores
Probably some more stuff, but I’d have to sit back and think about it.

Biggest issues facing us today:
211 (This is killing WvW.)
Population issues
Class balances (of course, this is a forever, ongoing thing, but little work has been done here)

Well, me and many others have been advocating this. And it’s not just HoT classes.

If any of you have been playing this game for more than 2 years, you’ll remember that about a year before HoT came out, they condensed the trait lines to limit you to 3 and they also eliminated the stat changes that came with the trait lines. In order to compensate for these loss of traits, they gave all of them to you as a base. The problem with this is that the increased defensive stats are not able to offset the offensive stats, so everyone across the board is outputting more dps.

Add to this the larger damage co-efficients on most HoT classes, and increased dps mechanics, means there’s a large power creep from the original balance of the classes and the game. There needs to be some buff to toughness / vitality. Double? No, that’s going overboard.

We’ve been asking for this ever since they made the trait stats a base. No avail.

Obvious who the thieves are on this thread. BTW, I also play a thief.

It is an overpowered skill. Enough about ping and precast. Interrupting a split second precast is very hard, especially because most of the time, they’re stealthed when initially attacking you. Add to that the quickness most thieves initially have, add the evade while the skill is active. It’s just kittened.

If I’m playing anything squishy, I’m one-shotted. If I’m playing a tougher class, then I’m either dead after a couple more vaults, or I am able to react, defend. If I’m alive, the thief usually runs away. If they stay, then I fight and, depending on my class/build, either win, or they finish me off.

I’m opposed to anything that can literally one shot. This is a general issue with HoT and power creep while not buffing toughness/vitality. At least with a stealthed backstab, it was limited to the thief being in stealth, which has a CD. Vault doesn’t.

Do you guys not have enough metrics on this yet?

People are just dumb. Can’t help it. I was running around on my mes the other night. 2.8K armor. Got hit by a thief. 9.2K vault, 3.2 this 2.6 that. No joke. So, kitten about damage imbalance.

Condi is DoT. You need the armor to survive the onslaught.

My glass thief runs with 12.8K health. My Guardian, about 14K. They can literally be one shotted by a power build.

DeceiverX.8361:

LetoII.3782:

DeceiverX.8361:

DH:
Valor – Passive Aegis, Condi removal (meditation), aegis and block reset on heal, AoE bonus toughness, block synergy, healing on meditations.
DH- AoE slow on trap, passive AoE Aegis, condi cleanse.

Most of this is wrong

Taken straight from the highest-ranked condition build for guardian from metabattle.

Traps don’t slow. That’s PvP only. You must be looking at the wrong build. Most of metabattle is crap

Yeah, I have no idea what the coverage is like on EU servers. On mine, and most other T1s, there’s highs and lows betweeen EU, NA, OCX, and SEA.

Uh, NA and EU are separate. Or do you mean the EU timezone on NA servers? You do realize that there are more timezones than just EU and NA, right?

I’m waiting for a download so I thought I’d bring this up. Diku inspired me cause he’s been pushing the globe system for 2 years now. He’s felt the need to start pushing it hard again. So I though I’d dust off one of my ideas.

Make matches 54 hours long instead of a week.

Now, there’s a lot of folks out there who’ve asked for matches to be 24 hours, but that’s not good because they’d always start and stop at the same time. That’s unfair to certain time zones. With 54 hours, ( 2 days plus 6), the start and stop time will always land in a different time zone. Also, the starts and stops will always be on different days of the week. This way, everyone gets a chance for reset and finish.

Want something more frequent, then do 30 hours. Longer? 78 hours.

Discuss. Download is done.

What a joke. OP has no clue.

Dunno why you guys keep bringing up thieves. They’re probably the worst at condi. Mostly bleeds with some poison and a dash of torment and confusion. Pretty crap. Easily cleansed. Ranger is probably next. Only really good if you get caught in their traps.

And so on.

Best classes?

Mesmer: They apply bleeds, burning, confusion, torment, and all in massive amounts and very quickly while having good defensive mechanics and traits that extend and increase condition damage. This makes cleansing very difficult and the best defense in killing the mesmer asap. This class needs precision.

Warrior: A well played condi warrior can be devestating, mostly due to it’s survivability, CCs, and that one of it’s main condis is burning. The downside is that it’s main condi is burning with bleeds as it’s secondary which is more easily cleansed than mesmer or necro. Needs precision.

Necro: Really op with condi. Is able to apply burns, poison, and bleeds on a regular and massive basis with a little torment thrown in, while corrupting boons, which applies lots more different types of condis. Impossible to cleanse everything. All the while having very high survivablity. The only downside is the time it takes to ramp up the damage, but once it does, it’s over. Needs precision

I’d mention guard, but it’s more of a burst burn. While devestating, it’s easily cleansed, and burning is it’s only real condi damage. While it doesn’t need precision, if it is not running a decent amount of toughness / vit, it can be one shotted due to it’s low health pool.

Also, I don’t play engi much, but I almost never ever see a condi engi now-adays. Condi rev I only rarely see in PvP.

So, really, the issue is more of class balance than the stat comboes. And as other’s have said, skill bypasses any stat combo by far. And as you can see, the best classes at condi all need a fair amount of precision in order to maximise their dps, so they will have to sacrifice toughness and vitality to get there. Also, expertise is a balancing act. You’re still sacrifising direct damage. Depending on the class, you may not want any. The more expertise you do have, the more you are depending on time.

Gosh, that sounds a lot like power builds.

You guys talking about 1v1 or large group combat? Large group, trailblazers is garbbage due to the expertise. Its a totally wasted stat because you’re fighting against tons of cleanses and resistance. If you’re trying to have a condi meta, then you need as much direct condi damagage as possible.

Dire is sacrificing precision which is needed for most condi builds as they have auto procs on crit

If you’re talking 1v1, well, that’s not really WvW. But, lets say you do just happen to run into one guy and never see his friends. You’re complaining about a stat set as it beats you. So, what? Do you beat everyone else except someone running this build? Isn’t that fair? Isn’t that balance? You can’t expect one build to beat everything in the game, otherwise, that would be unbalanced.

Sounds more like another person who needs to learn to play but instead comes on the forums and kittenes about not being able to beat everyone on his build. I can speak from experience that as a condi player, there are people out there that wreck me. And as someone who fights these builds, I wreck them, depending on what I’m running.

You can’t have “fights” unless people are playing, and there’s a lot of people who actually care about winning. PPT and fights are not mutually exclusive. Most guilds I know actually do both. Fewer pugs, fewer guild mates, and fewer commanders equals less people to fight. Less people to fight equals less fight guilds out there. Less fight guilds out there means less people for the PPT/PPK people to fight. All around boring. 211 has to go asap.

The 211 scoring system has been a huge step in the wrong direction.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Spurnshadow.3678:

An additional thought on this. As a BG player, I also feel that we’ve lost a tremendous amount of control over our destiny. We’ve spent years creating a community. Whether it’s for better or worse, it is ours. We, as a collective, have been in control over our destiny, whether we push hard, or play casual. Trying to fill our gaps in coverage, trying to police ourselves with our behavior. Trying to get newer players in the loop, get them better, train them. What have you.

But with this 211 scoring system, we are no longer in control over our own destiny. If we win, it was because we had the co-operation of the 3rd place server. It was not due to our own efforts, and, for me, this feels like it’s cheating us, and also cheating the 3rd place server, as they will receive zero reward from this co-operation.

In the coming weeks, if Maguma looses their link, then maybe BG is the dominant server again in T1. These same issues will affect them and whover we’re matched with as well.

Of course, this is somewhat unique to the T1 servers, but it’s still noteworthy.

Translation: BG can no longer focus the third place server during their dead time zones for an easy win, please open BG.

Translation: reading is hard. I’m just gonna insert some trollish thing.

Svarty.8019:

I think we can leave the scoring for now and move on to population imbalance.

;)

This won’t matter. Even if you had perfect population balance among the 3 servers in a tier, all these issues with the 211 scoring system remain.

An additional thought on this. As a BG player, I also feel that we’ve lost a tremendous amount of control over our destiny. We’ve spent years creating a community. Whether it’s for better or worse, it is ours. We, as a collective, have been in control over our destiny, whether we push hard, or play casual. Trying to fill our gaps in coverage, trying to police ourselves with our behavior. Trying to get newer players in the loop, get them better, train them. What have you.

But with this 211 scoring system, we are no longer in control over our own destiny. If we win, it was because we had the co-operation of the 3rd place server. It was not due to our own efforts, and, for me, this feels like it’s cheating us, and also cheating the 3rd place server, as they will receive zero reward from this co-operation.

In the coming weeks, if Maguma looses their link, then maybe BG is the dominant server again in T1. These same issues will affect them and whover we’re matched with as well.

Of course, this is somewhat unique to the T1 servers, but it’s still noteworthy.

OK, so an update on the end of the week regarding some data.

In the past, the war score has typically gotten closer and closer together, meaning their difference in ratios gets smaller. This seems to generally be the case, but not in the degree that I was expecting. I think this might be due to the lower level of competition in this new system.

Also, some match-ups seem to be very lopsided when comparing activity to skirmish score. Most notably T2. T2 has closed the gap tremendously in war score, meaning there’s been much greater activity for the 2nd and 3rd place servers, but the skirmish score is nowhere near reflective of this activity.

Also of note is in T4. DB has actually surpassed NS in war score, yet they lag behind in skirmish score. This may simply be the skirmish system working to keep run-away matches from happening by incrementing the score to 2 hour time blocks, or maybe they’ve been pulling some overtime during the week, but been falling just a bit short. Dunno. I’m not paying close attention to T4.

I suspect that having efforts not rewarded with scoring will continue to erode the player base. On my server, BG, and the enemies I encounter, I’ve seen a large decrease in activity and population. I truly think this is due to our efforts not being rewarded. Yes, there’s other philosophies at play. As one example, there’s rivalries that we’d actually like to engage in, which requires us to fight TC. This means the 2nd and 3rd place servers are not engaging the first place server.

Another example: we do not have direct lines of communication with the players and commanders on the other servers. As such, we can’t co-ordinate 2v1s. All we can do is try to incentive’s 2v1s via our own behavior. However this doesn’t always work. So, instead of fighting a much greater population in the 1st place server, it’s more fun to engage in a more even fight with the 2nd/3rd place servers.

Without this 2v1, the whole 211 scoring system falls apart. WvW is a RvRvR. It is the core of what makes this game mode great and above all other games regarding large scale PvP. The only other exception is the fight mechanics. Please return us to this 3 way free-for-all.

I also find it amazing, and frankly insulting that we’ve gotten no response from any dev on this most fundamental and drastic change to WvW, and whether they think this is working, not working, or still to be determined. This lack of attention could also be affecting player attrition.

Sigh, so many of you are totally lost on the concept of the ratio between points and how that affects peoples behavior.

But, Kaatora,

The mentality, strategies, and tactics will change if those different scoring systems were in place. As the ratio between 1 and 2 is 100% and the ratio between 4 and 5 is 25%. That’s a huge difference and affects how people play.

The other major factor with these scoring differences is how it effects glicko. I’ve already outlined this previously, but the current trends are the strong T1 server will continue to gain glicko and never be caught. Also, if there is little randomization between tiers, the 2nd and 3rd place servers in all tiers will normalize and have less and less chances of getting a random roll down. This might be false if the winning server’s glicko in all tiers is already high enough to get the random roll. I haven’t studied this trend closely enough. There’s too many factors to figure that out right now.

@Mini

Well, I’m not gonna do that. That’s Anet’s job. I just did the one chart to show how drastically is the difference.

Jenkar, this is 2nd grade math. there’s a huge difference between 321 and 543. You’re just being argumentative.

Torqued, sure there a many people who just play for fights and habit. I know I’m a habitual player. But there are also lots who play for both fights and PPT and others who just PPT. I’ve seen a sharp decline of pugs on EB. I’ve seen a decline of people trying to win. Winning is what drives this game mode, not fights. As fewer people log in, there will be fewer to fight for the fight people. The pure fight people will just start GvGing at OS or a guild hall and not bother running around WvW for an hour looking for a fight.

Also, @Torqued. Yes, it would be unfair to take this weeks data and apply a 321 skirmish scoring system. The best thing to do would go back in history and do the same comparison with that weeks scores to this weeks scores.

This is a chart I made that, at the current writing, compares war score to skirmish score utilizing the 211 system. I think enough time has gone by to start to get an idea of what things are like.

As you can see, there is a huge difference between war score and skirmish score. Now, even though BG, my server, has basically not been trying this week, the war score is much closer than what I expected, however, the skirmish score shows a much greater difference. The same thing is true in every tier. While I have no idea what the strategies have been for other servers, it shows a clearly disturbing picture, particularly with T2 and T3: their 2nd place war score is much closer to first, but their skirmish score is much further away. What’s worse, is that as the week goes on, the difference in war score will tighten, but I suspect that the skirmish score will continue to increase it’s difference.

While this is very telling about the current situation, it would be unfair to compare this current weeks war score with a 321 system as people’s, and server’s behavior, tactics, and strategies would be different under a 321 system, so we would have no idea how many skirmish wins/losses would occurr. This is all we can do with the current data.

This is truely unsettling and needs to change asap. This is essentially like golem rush week and the sooner it ends, the better.

It seems that is the trend in T1 and T2. What’s the point of defending, building any siege, or getting rid of a waypointed keep if after all that effort, the enemy still gets 1st in the skirmish and gets rewarded double the points. Meanwhile, the weaker server which may have done nothing or, even worse, harrassed you the whole time, gets the same amount of points.

I can’t speak for TC, but BG just stopped trying early on. I don’t have any ears in T2, but judging by the score, it seems the same there as well.

This has also affected the amount of roamers out there. If the contribution of small groups is gonna amount to diddly squat, then what’s the point? Gold means a lot more to small groups as they don’t have a large guild to contribute to siege and food. Sure, you can roam around and get into fights, but how long will it be until you find someone? Better to just go into PvP.

Wake up, Anet! Look at the scores!

And if you guys read my posts, this effects all the tiers. Just look at the scores. Stop fixating on BG or T1. As the OP, I’ve never asked for BG to be open in this thread. I’m not insinuating that we should be. T4 seems to be the only one who is having an even match. That may just be an abberation.

Stop trolling. This is a serious problem.

Oh, yeah. And one more thing. Someone said it before, but the ratio between 2 and 1 is even greater than the ratio between 2 and 3, so if there is a dominant server, it’s just gonna make a matchup with a dominant server even more of a run away match. I swear, do you guys think about this stuff? This is what’s obviously happening in the T1-3 matches. I’ll just say again, the ratios of 1,2,3 wasn’t that great, but better than this. Something like 3,4,5 would be better.

Well, so far, everything is looking exactly like what I predicted. One thing to note: what is the point of trying, if you would normally place 2nd, what’s the point in fighting, what’s the point of spending gold on siege, what’s the point of thinking about what the best path of action is going to be, if you’re only going to get 1 point, the same as the server who’s non-existent?

Sure there’s fights, but that novelty will only last for so long, because eventually, the stronger force will just be consolidated and kicking your kitten , because one server has most likely signed off and isn’t providing a distraction to pull forces away.

WvW is a 3 way fight game mode. R v R v R. It is the essence of what makes this game mode in GW2 so special. At it’s core is competition and that means there is going to be server who places 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.

Skirmishes have been a great addition to the game in order to curb run away night capping / day capping, whatever, and overpowered servers from running away with the match.

But this 211 system feels like the mentality of everyone gets a trophy. Eventually, the 2v1 grind is going to be tedious and people are just going to stop playing. If people on strong servers stop playing, then there will be less population and others will stop playing. Participation begets participation. The adverse is true. Apathy is infectious.

I think this might be the death of WvW for me.

Guys,

You can’t look at past matches and place this new scoring system on it to see what the difference is. The reason is peoples behavior and strategies will change. The behavior in past matches are based on a 321 scoring system. Strategy will be totally different in a 211 system

You should not bias my OP on the fact that I’m from BG. We’re used to 2v1s. It’s just part of being on this server. I’m solely thinking about the health of the game.

I’ve found most of the recent changes to WvW have been good, and have made many posts saying so. This one is flat out horrible.

Awarding 1 point for 2nd and 3rd will offer no incentive for competition. One server could just not play and have no negative consequence. What’s worse, it take a huge amount of strategic value away from the game, trying to push one server down to 3rd, or help another up to 2nd, or whatever, in order to try to get the skirmish placement one wants.

As there will be no difference between 2nd and 3rd, this will only incentivise constant 2v1s against whichever server is placing 1st. This will be no fun for the 1st place server. WvW is supposed to be a 3 way matchmaking system, not 1v1.

If this has been done in order to keep the matches closer together, then I don’t understand why y’all haven’t implemented a system I suggested when the skirmish system was implemented. The ratio between 1, 2, and 3 are the largest you can get among whole numbers. Instead, award 3, 4, and 5. This would lower the ratio and make it so there is still a close match by the end of the week, unless the 3rd server is just really outmatched.

If you are trying to make outmatched servers more competitive, then this is no way to solve the problem. It’s just a gimmick. Outmatched servers need people and organization, not some scoring gimmick.

The other dramatic effect this will have on WvW is how it will effect volitility in glicko. Since servers will now be very close together in score, there will be less gains/losses in glicko score. This means that servers will have a much more difficult time trying to move up or down the rankings. This will also lessen the variety of matches as servers will remain further apart in scoring, thereby lessening the odds of a random tier jump.

It says in the patch notes that this was something the players wanted. Sorry, I never remember this topic being brought up.

Seriously, how can you guys be so shortsighted. It really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how this is going to change things.

So funny seeing all the salty people posting here that have no clue.

The fact is, BG has an active NA population. No OCX guilds. We have one big sea guild, KnM, and maybe some others. We recently lost a popular SEA commander et. al. to an EU server. Frankly, I just don’t play at that time. And one EU guild. The only reason we win so much is because we just have more roamers and a couple small 5 man groups that run during off hours to keep things capped. Half of our EU timezone is populated by NA folks not working and most of our OCX is NA insomniacs.

I’d say, we have half of the population we used to have, but were still considered full. So yeah, it’s no surprise that we’re opening up.

So far, a couple of you stated that the previous system was bad, that poeple will gravitate to the larger servers. That’s just flat out false.

Not everyone wanted to be in T1. Many actually preferred T2 as that was more of the “fight guild” GvG mentality. There were others who didn’t even want that, and they were in the lower tiers, and chose to stay there. That only occurred because the players tried to keep things that way.

At the current rate, it will be impossible for Anet to get metrics on full servers as people can just transfer more cheaply to a lower, cheaper server. What we have now is essentially the same structure as merged servers, i.e. we’re playing among twelve servers, but the control is out of our hands and being put into Anets. Whether that’s good or bad, I’m not sure. We’ve been playing with this now for what, eight months? From my perspective, it’s nice to have different people to fight, but I’d rather it be back in control of the community.

So, I came out pretty hard against Anet for this last round of linkings. When Mag places 1st, and is in T1 for weeks, I don’t understand how they can continue to get a link. But this is my laymans point of view. There’s lots of things going on behind the scenes regarding population and timezones that I’m not, and can not, be aware of.

It’s evident that even though Maguma still got a link, their new one is much weaker. This means that they would have been even worse off had they not had a link at all, and would have fell quickly down to T2, and possibly lower. Who knows. So, there’s more thought going on to these re-links.

I think one of the issues that I’m having, and others, is the apparent unfairness of these links. There’s lots of manual manipulations that Anet is doing. Whether it’s for better or worse is not the issue of this topic, but that it exists. Add to this the additions and subtractions of glicko. This also frustrates many poeple and makes their efforts in WvW seem deminished. What’s the point of trying to win if Anet is just going to negate that with a few keystrokes?

I understand that they’re trying to maintain a balance and prevent crazy volitility with the matchups. This would also not be as fun, as there would be a dead server falling in the ranks or an overpowered server dominating their way up.

Another big downside to the links is that as some servers get used to playing with their allies, they get re-linked and have to go through the whole process of making new friends, finding out who are guilds/commanders they like running with, who they get along with, etc. Some host servers are just, flat out, unfriendly, from what I’ve heard. That can’t be fun either.

It seems to me that the easiest and fairest solution is to just eliminate the 12 lowest populated servers. Offer them a free, one time use transfer to an un-full server.

Let the players go back to determining what level of activity they want. Let the players decide who they want to play with. This will also create less work for Anet as they don’t have to do this relinking. It will also benefit Anets perception as they won’t have to be the bad guy for apparent unfair matchups and deal with the kneejerk pushback from players like me who just don’t understand what’s going on.

Sure, this will kitten a lot of people off as the lower 12 servers will loose their identity. However, it will create an opportunity for them to find a new identity and have that aspect of the game to fight for. As of now, there is almost none of this.

I honestly don’t know why there’s been so much resistance to merging servers in the past. There really wasn’t enough population to fill 24 servers to begin with in WvW, but it was neccessary for the other aspects of the game. Since launch, GW2 has switched to a megaserver system where pve and pvp don’t depend on seperate servers. WvW is the only aspect of the game that still utilizes this. If there wasn’t a population to fill all aspects of the game at launch, why are we still using 24 servers four years later? All games have attrition. All games that use seperate server systems end up condensing them. It’s about time Anet gets around to doing so.

I’ll say it again: if this is the only build that you are having problems with, then you’re doing pretty good. If you’re able to kill everything in every build, then you’re build will be nerfed.

There isn’t one build that can or should be able to kill everything. We don’t have every skill available to us. Some games let us have access to 40 skills that enable us to deal with many situations. This isn’t one of them. We have to make choices that limit what we can run with.

WTF? Maguma has a link? They’ve placed first and have been in T1 for weeks. kitten . TC placed 4th and JQ is 5th. Whoever was in charge of this has their head really far up their kitten . No one voted for kitten not have links, but it was done. Now, you’re not even de-linking the top 3 servers. Dunno if I can continue with this crap.

Sorry, OP, but it’s really a matter of your class, your build, and a l2p issue.

Not every class/build will be able to beat a dire mesmer, but some do if played well. Just like you might have a build that you’re currently playing with that might beat most of the people you fight because you’re really good at it. Is it really unreasonable to think that you should be able to beat every class/build in the game? No. There’s just too much variety. If the dire mesmer is your only bane, then I’d say you’re doing pretty good.

What’s the deal? How long has this been going on for and when can we expect WvW to be back up?

Thanks.

This is my favorite holiday event, but I’m pretty disappointing there’s nothing new. Adding a few skins doesn’t count, I’m talking about activities.

Seriously? Stop whining. It’ll take a few hours over a few days to get the reward track done. Big deal. God forbid you’re exposed to something new.

Meanwhile, if I want a legendary backpiece, I’m forced to do hundereds of hours of PvP and may still not get it because I need to “cross 4 ranks” which is broken. Or If I want legendary armor, I’m foced to do hundereds of hours or raids, which I can’t do because people don’t want me in their raid cause I’m a newb.

This is the least of the issues regarding legendaries.