At its most basic, I think what happened here was a result of mismatched expectations. When ArenaNet used the word “chance” in its advertisements, it was using it in the most literal sense – the possibility that something might occur with unspecified probability. When many players read the advertisements, they interpreted “chance” to mean something more akin to “reasonable chance” in the traditional gambling sense, wherein the expected value of participating in a contest is not grossly disproportionate to the cost to enter. I don’t think people felt entitled to winning, but they did feel entitled to what they thought was reasonable chance at winning. This is the same sort of entitlement that people feel when they walk into a casino, and it does not inherently prevent them from walking out happy, even if they ended up losing.
What does interfere with their enjoyment is if they come to find out that the expected value of their contest entry was a great deal lower than they thought it was after they already paid to enter. Some might argue that they should not have read “reasonable chance” into “chance” in the first place, but this sort of interpretation of linguistic ambiguity (when perfect mathematical clarity is not available) is something we all do every day, and is in fact unavoidable. If we say that making any kind of assumption beyond the most literal definitions of words is unjustified and a symptom of entitlement, then we’re saying it would have been perfectly fine for ArenaNet to use the word “chance” to mean “there’s a chance our programmers implemented code to allow you to get a reward, and a chance that they did not.” I doubt many people think that usage of the word would be justified, yet that is where relying solely on literal definitions gets us.
Ultimately, my point is this: if you describe an opportunity in a way that is prone to misinterpretation, you should expect people to get upset when their reasonable interpretation of the opportunity is later proven to be wrong.
Here’s a thought: announce a firm end date for free transfers, then reset WvW server rankings and scores to start fresh on that date.
Both measures are important, but only in combination will they resolve the problems we have been seeing with WvW populations. Stopping free transfers alone won’t accomplish much – it will only lock in the disparities that currently exist among the servers. People have already demonstrated that they aren’t willing to transfer to a losing team in exchange for short queue times, even temporarily. Why expect them to tie themselves to a “losing” team for the long haul? In order to convince people that moving to redistribute the population is worthwhile, they need to feel like they’re not signing up to be slaughtered each and every week for the rest of eternity. With a rankings wipe, the servers get a chance to reconstitute themselves without the baggage of the “loser” title that discourages others from joining and prevents them from attracting the populations they need in order to do better.
The large guilds would also benefit, as this would provide the opportunity that some have been asking for: a way to transfer to a lower population server without immediately being followed by countless hangers-on who would make the queue times on the new server just as bad as the ones they were trying to escape. Right now, such a transfer would be pointless because it would fail to accomplish its purpose (other people would just follow them), and it would also require them to walk away from the success that they had built on their current server. A ranking reset, along with the ability to port guild perks along with the guild itself, would free up the guilds to go where they think they’ll have the best play experience rather than stay where they are because they feel stuck by their investments. The end of free transfers would then discourage many of the “victory chasers” from following.
This will, of course, require a new period of experimental matchups to get the servers sorted into relatively well balanced brackets, which was supposedly what we’ve been doing for the last several weeks. As I have argued elsewhere, however, the current rankings serve little purpose because the “teams” that they rank don’t really exist, and they will not exist until free transfers stop. The membership of a team can currently change so quickly and so easily that the team that ends a a week-long match is not really the same one that started it: vast influxes and/or outflows of players pretty much guarantee it.
Assigning persistent scores to non-persistent entities simply makes no sense, so we need to begin the scoring again from a time when it does make sense: when the teams are more constant because free transfers have ended.
Under the way the system currently works, assigning the servers a ranking or score seems like a meaningless exercise – the server that begins a match on Friday can’t really be considered the same server as the one that ends the match seven days later. Would it make any sense to rank the performance of a sports team if the players could decide to join the other side at half time, and either be replaced (or not) by people who weren’t on the team in the first place? By the end of the match, the “team” that gets the score isn’t the same team that earned it – it’s just a random group of people who decided that they like that score and joined the team so it can be their own, or whoever remains after those who don’t like that score go elsewhere. Right now, we might as well be awarding points for the performance of the hardware on which the game server is hosted, since it is the only part of the team that has reason to be there from beginning to end.
Being part of more than one guild (as in the very common situation from other games where I would like to have one character in guild X, and a different character in guild Y) only makes the problem worse. If the characters are of widely different levels, expect to be bugged to get on your higher level character to be able to do higher level content with one or the other guild, even if what you really want to do is play the lower level character because you enjoy its mechanics more. I would greatly prefer if guild membership were character based instead of account based. Sure, you could be part of all the same guilds with all characters if you wanted to, but you shouldn’t HAVE to.
This is definitely a problem – not because mesmers can hide in keeps, that’s fine. The problem is that they can glitch into a keep with what seems like relative ease. I unwittingly participated in two tower captures using this glitch on Fort Aspenwood yesterday. A mesmer tells everyone, “hey, I have a portal into X tower, come use it” so of course we all do. Only once we capture the tower and move on to the next one, where the same mesmer once again creates a portal to get everyone inside, do I see first hand what’s happening: he creates an entry portal outside at the base of a wall, and then seems to fly upward to be suddenly standing on top of that same wall, where he creates the exit. Everyone runs through and caps the tower in seconds.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the portal ability as designed, and it can be a very strategic tool when working as intended. What is wrong is that it either is the source of a very serious glitch, or allows such easy and effective exploitation of a glitch from another source that it’s doing serious damage to the integrity of WvW gameplay. Glitching past walls needs to be fixed, period. If it is impossible to fix due to the nature of the game engine, then the portal ability needs to be modified to prevent its exploitation. One person glitching past a wall should not immediately equal 40 people going past that same wall (many of whom may not have realized that it was an exploit rather than a legitimate use of portal).
I’ve noticed this too, and it does seem ridiculously short. And no, this is in the trait line with +condition damage, not condition duration, so it isn’t lengthened by putting in more points.