Guild Wars 2

I’m happy because the majority of people who waited the longest in queue are people who historically have earned that fact. While it is unfortunate (and I do not envy that) the lowest tier got merged into the already stacked tier, this was a game-wide event. It happened to everyone, to some extent. Its severity is temporary.

I’m happy because there are also other flaws in the existing WvW system which were re-hashed and revealed again last night, and that is good because right now ArenaNet is paying the most attention they ever have to these events.

I’m happy because the net result of the move as-is was good, and the longer term outlook appears better, including some easing of, even repair of, what went wrong last night.

Keviin Snow.5760:

i notice now my cpu and fan kick in harder ,
its like driving a car , ripping it up to 7500 RPM all the way ,

sionnach.5391:

Server pride is unique to this game mode.

Realm pride has always been a central feature of RvR. Server pride in WvW is as much a kittenization of realm pride as WvW is of RvR. This current form of it—the ever parroted “game mode”—is weakest in every one of the ways that would lend credibility to strongly held pride that approaches foolish patriotism.

sionnach.5391:

I think it’s especially strong on the lower tiers, where you develop really strong bonds over the years and have had to fight against wild odds and put up with a lot of guilds coming and going. So, I don’t think it’s misplaced at all – I think it’s important and it keeps us coming back to this particular game over others.

I agree in principle but not in fact. The facts of WvW design do not match the intent of your principle, and I believe that opinions to the contrary are foolish.

Jayne.9251:

Virtute.8251:

Essays aren’t changing the fact that stubborn small town pride is misplaced in this, here and now.

If anything, the responses here are a great indication the community ties and server identification are still incredibly important motivators as to why people still play.

Sure. It’s anthropologically interesting in the same way that any tribalism is.

katz, the fact that any one of us hasn’t personally written and acknowledged your specific complaint or viewpoint here is no indication that we haven’t previously engaged it in thought and conversation. We have. We’ve done so for nearly four years now. This is a relatively old subject; especially your take on it.

For you to get what you want, you need to convince ArenaNet to provide a special type of WvW in which the maps are twenty kilometers square and each team is limited to 20 or so players each. I would support you in having that. I disagree with you on trying to shoehorn that onto the one and only WvW leaderboard currently in play, and you forcing your view on anyone who is attached to or influenced by your server and its matches; past, present, and future.

No. Sorry.

katz.8376:

no… YOU don’t get it….
ITS…NOT…JUST…THE…KITTEN….QUEUES

Hey, if you’re that into this whole “server pride” thing to go that far with the feels about it, then you must also be into some sort of “professional sport” fandom, right? Or, maybe GW2 is your replacement for that, and you can see the analogy still.

Have you never seen a sports team move their home?

Please don’t confuse disagreement with misunderstanding.

T I M E – S L I C E D A C T I O N L E V E L

Kanebrake.6192:

The reason a lot of us moved off of the lower tiered servers

I know. I’m from old Anvil Rock, 2012. I’ve played in every tier, and in most NA servers.

The rest of it doesn’t matter. Deal with the one, or deal with the other.

Virtute.8251:

The beta is for confirming that the merger works. It’s not for confirming that the gameplay design decision is a correct one for most players. We already know the correct gameplay design choice in an MMOG: Force players together, by forcing them to play together or not play at all.

Essays aren’t changing the fact that stubborn small town pride is misplaced in this, here and now.

X T D.6458:

You dont get it do you.

You don’t get it, do you? Tier 1 NA got the least amount of additional players. A relatively insignificant number added to their queues. These map queues are not coming from the server merge. These map queues are coming from the hyped reset night, and the vast majority of those queueing players were already on your servers.

Every server in the game had map queues last night.

It will pass, and it will do so primarily because a large amount of the people who came in last night will not (and would not, under any circumstance) play WvW long-term and frequently.

But, you don’t get it, do you?

ArenaNet,

The change has been good and feels like a net positive for long term. Thanks for having the nerves to do it.

My server also had instant queues; 150 EBG, 50 for each BL. I don’t mind this on reset night.

All things considered, having seen how both extremes played out over the past 3.5 years, it’s fine to do this now as a first step to better ways later. Reset queues game-wide are far preferable to one-sided queues fighting against half-full maps for the entire week. I think you weighed these extremes and made the right choice for now.

Everyone else—especially TC, BG, JQ, YB,

If your queues are punishing to the point of being unplayable, then that is how it should be, and you should be moving your guilds to the bottom of the board. Your queues are why we didn’t move into your servers when you were throwing gold at us for the past 3.5 years. Then we did move in when the queues died because the game died. Now the queues are back, and now you’re persona non grata for transfers again.

Get used to it.

Malediktus.9250:

Osu.6307:

Malediktus.9250:

Since you are saving 3*4 map servers this way, will you use the server resources you save by this to make t1 fights less laggy and increase the max amount of players per map?

You can have one or the other, but not both.

We can have both if we spread the resources 50/50 :p A bit higher player cap and less laggy fight

In other words, if you tie enough bottle rockets together, you can launch your kid brother into orbit.

Chris Barrett.3280:

Virtute.8251:

Okay. How are Glicko ratings for individual servers being calculated during linked matches? Some of us are wondering what the trick is to separate the linked worlds during Glicko rating calc, so that new (different) pairings can occur at each (for now 3 month) pairing interval.

Linked “host” worlds have their Glicko data updated in the usual way. Linked “guest” world Glicko data isn’t affected. It’s not yet determined what approach we’ll use for Glicko data for guest worlds when world links are changed, in the case that a guest either becomes a host or goes solo.

This means that the hosted server does not exist for Glicko rating, but does exist for receiving transfers into a match when the match’s host servers are full.

That means that the dominant community in a pairing, usually the host server, will recruit from and send incoming transfers to the hosted server in the link.

When the link is broken later, you will also be dividing guilds whose rosters are now spread across the linked servers.

I think you should make the link a permanent merge, and set aside the word game of “linking”. That would be more up front in communication and also more straight forward technically. Our lower tier counterparts (Bronze League and half of Silver, in NA) are going to hate this move regardless. Terminology isn’t going to soften the blow.

Edit: To be more clear, I do see and even agree with this first-pass at the move; even hinging it upon the inference that “link” is temporary, so that no one thinks this merger is irrevocable. Let’s be real, though. Some form of this is going to stick, and resetting the link “at most every 3 months” means that a link exists regardless.

The beta is for confirming that the merger works. It’s not for confirming that the gameplay design decision is a correct one for most players. We already know the correct gameplay design choice in an MMOG: Force players together, by forcing them to play together or not play at all.

Chris Barrett.3280:

Due to the increased deviation and volatility combined with fewer total worlds, there shouldn’t be a “Glicko hell” again for a little while. We’ll continue to watch how Glicko rating, deviation, and volatility develop to see how well world linking— and our approach to it this first time with Glicko— plays out in the Live game.

Okay. How are Glicko ratings for individual servers being calculated during linked matches? Some of us are wondering what the trick is to separate the linked worlds during Glicko rating calc, so that new (different) pairings can occur at each (for now 3 month) pairing interval.

Thelgar.7214:

Listen to Mal, he probably knows more about your Teamspeak server security than you do.

The API endpoints in discussion are for authentication. That is primarily a matter of privacy and identity. It is not security in any but the broadest pedestrian PHP app “programmer” definition of such things.

kins.3294:

Stop trying to get people to you T2.

and either post videos or get out.

X T D.6458:

Double teaming is not something anyone should be proud of, or actively engage in because its just a crappy thing to do.

I’m doing it, am proud of it, and will continue actively engaging in it because it’s a crappy thing to do to people who’ve more than earned it.

The most unhappy (dissatisfied) players are the least vocal ones. They’ve left the game, said why as they were leaving, and repeat themselves when and if they do come back to reconfirm.

If they were silent, then you would be equally out of line for speaking on their behalf as I would be. They aren’t silent, and they don’t agree amongst themselves any more than you and I do. There is the dissonance.

Whatever WvW is or was, it’s shelf life is passed. The shame is in it passing so soon, with so few gameplay innovations along the way. It wasn’t six months into the thing that an apparent majority were already looking forward to its possibilities rather than it’s deliveries. I know that because there were 500 on my roster, and our server had thousands rostered and logging in multiple times per week, easily pulling more than 100 into a TeamSpeak server at peak hours, on a WvW server that was then floating between tiers 5 and 7. At it’s lowest points, it looked exactly like Fort Aspenwood does now, but far more toxic. The vitriol came from the dissonance.

It’s a fundamental disagreement about how RvR should play in the long game of months and years. ArenaNet disagrees with players while players disagree amongst themselves, and the majority of player to player disagreements probably revolve around them agreeing that ArenaNet is wrong about something.

Dusty Moon.4382:

Virtute.8251:

FogLeg.9354:

How would you “fix” that?

Deny opponent siege placement (excluding flame rams and golems) within a radius of about 1,200 units of a destructible wall.

It would be the same code as is used in area siege cap (maximum of 5 within a radius of each other), with a few slight modifications and with a check for wall ownership compared to home server of the player trying to deploy the bundle.

So basically, you want to nullify flame rams.

No. I specifically accounted for that.

Dusty Moon.4382:

They need to be NEXT TO A GATE IN ORDER TO WORK.

No. I specifically accounted for that.

Dusty Moon.4382:

Well, this type of cata placement is needed since the radius and blind arrow cart shots is ridiculous.

No. Catapult has longer range.

Dusty Moon.4382:

People that complain about this, must just want PPT all the time.

No. We just want ArenaNet to try harder at making siege play more varied and nuanced. This thread barely scratches the surface of it, and to OP I gave -the- one correct solution for the most likely fix with the least amount of programmer effort and player pain. Read it again. If you’re still upset, just accept that you’re wrong and walk away.

PS: The next best solution is to allow friendly fire on the catapult projectile’s AoE when it hits a wall, so that the “blowback” damages players and the catapults themselves. It probably should be doing that anyway, but ANet is fanatical about disallowing friendly fire as an anti-griefing measure; and that position does make good sense, if online forums and chats are any measure of player behavior. :^)

Zetsumei.4975:

Theyve been asking that question for the past 3 years, every time players get excited and take the time to write up huge essays and eventually those players realise theyre being eternally led on.

ANet loves a good essay. Problem is they read the wrong ones.

FogLeg.9354:

How would you “fix” that?

Deny opponent siege placement (excluding flame rams and golems) within a radius of about 1,200 units of a destructible wall.

It would be the same code as is used in area siege cap (maximum of 5 within a radius of each other), with a few slight modifications and with a check for wall ownership compared to home server of the player trying to deploy the bundle.

Gunner Morton.8340:

This thread is timeless though.

Yes.

Virtute.8251:

Only a WvW player is at risk of forum account infringement for contributing to this thread one month from now.

:)

Only a WvW player remembers that SoPP.7034 should receive a forum infraction for bringing back this thread.

TorquedSoul, it’s fun and useful to think about. Would be more useful that ArenaNet were willing and permitted to discuss their own processes and conclusions for such analyses. I think it would be enlightening, and could reveal what I suspect: That you’ve just illustrated a thinking processes that, when applied as above to WvW, can produce the current dissonance between ArenaNet and players, and between players who are trying to have fun in a system that is often working against them while it’s also keeping them interested enough to continue trying.

No amount of privileged access to metrics data will improve the analysis when the observer is willing to rigorously construct the model—

TorquedSoul.8097:

These cases would be varying degrees of three basic behaviors: Capture w/o fighting, Capture w/ fighting, and Fighting w/o capturing.

—only to immediately shoot the exercise in the head:

TorquedSoul.8097:

The motivations for the actors engaging in any of these three activities is irrelevant.

That simply isn’t true. Motivating factors are everything to understanding the correlation between capture objectives and fights. Of course we wouldn’t look at motivation while sorting events into those categories. The sort would occur merely by the facts of the events. After the sort, player motivations are the only thing that will give meaning or reason to the data.

The thread OP question itself assumes two motivating factors: 1 ) “I want to capture”, and 2 ) “I want to fight”. In asking us to think with you about which of these drives the other, you have asked us to think about whether or not one motivates the other to occur. “Drive” and “cause” are synonymous with “motivate”.

It is tacit that conflicting desires (“I want to capture” vs. “I don’t want you to capture”) will motivate a fight. It is equally apparent that “I want to fight you” conflicts with “I don’t want to fight you”, and escaping the fight by hiding in a building can motivate a capture.

You won’t know which of those desires caused any given event unless you observe the involved players, rather than the data API. Nor will the API explain the current state of WvW: that after 3 years the players have distilled their gameplay to a collection of styles that typically omit the majority of what a fresh player like yourself sees on the face of the game’s design.

Look. We all know that what you’re really getting at is a broader argument in favor of a long-term strategy style of PPT competition, and something, something, “playing as intended”. We get it, and the root of most argument you’re going to get is that we’ve already played that through and found that it is shallow and uncompelling now for a variety of reasons.

WvW has siege and capture in play, and therefore it happens, causes fights, and is caused by fights. It is in itself a form of fight. Cool story, right?

Have you ever thought about why the matches are one week long? They were longer. Ever wondered why there are “matches” at all? I can give you a hint: It’s the same reason that sPvP matches are time limited. We grow into disrespecting the RvR mechanics of WvW because it is similar to sPvP in the wrong ways, omits key rules of sPvP that help make matches competitive, and significant parts of the design work directly against other equally significant pieces of the whole experience.

It has nothing to do with misunderstanding something that you’re somehow able to shine light on. That goes the other way, in this case. You’re on land we’ve already traveled.

DeWolfe.2174:

Virtute.8251:

TorquedSoul runs away from orange swords to capture a camp for tick and feels good about it.

FTFY

But maybe the running from fights to get capture isn’t for the tick. Maybe it’s for the rewards!

And maybe this argument wouldn’t happen if the deeper and longer term RvR parts of WvW weren’t so completely broken, shallow, and irrelevant in so many ways that will not be even slightly touched by the majority of recently stated “priorities”.

It was nice for a while, a few years ago, but now it’s just a stale relationship and we’re tired of each other’s morning breath. All we want to do is fight and one-up each other. That’s the WvW that needs to be supported by the iterate, iterate, iterate train; not this gimicky little PvE-painted PvP conquest map with the capture points spread out further.

TorquedSoul loses by running away from orange swords to capture camps, and feels good about it.

http://www.gw2wvw.net/comment/266809#comment-266809

ANet can refund the material resources used to research the upgrade. That precedent is already set.

Complete invisibility stealth in itself is a kittenty mechanic in context of the surrounding systems in GW2.

sparc.3649:

It’s funny that ANYONE thinks that by moving servers they’ll have fun again.

Not as funny as the small-town idea that the big city has nothing to offer and is inherently evil.

sparc.3649:

I’ve been on AR since 3-day-head-start, therefore been with the server during it’s ups AND downs.

That’s cool, but WvW’s server match-making is not equivalent to RvR designs in which a “server” holds the entire tri-realm match. That is what breaks loyalty for WvW, and that is why server pride is a non-fun thing to hold on to in the majority of experiences.

sparc.3649:

AR once got up to what, T3/T4, now we sit at the very bottom of the barrel again T8/24th!

False. We capped at rank 14, which is T5, and it was then that the majority of our commanders and PPTers were ready to accept the facts that had ended my pptmanding. Then we left, and:

sparc.3649:

Funny thing is, we’ve had many people leave that ended up just eventually disbanding anyways!

The disbands had nothing to do with the transfers, and would have happened regardless. Your strongest remaining roster is TWIN, which spans most of the NA servers (I’m in it), and it is not a WvW guild.

sparc.3649:

I tried to warn people, “you think moving will make things any better”, they didn’t listen, and now they probably don’t even play the game any longer

Yes, it made things better. Yes we still play. When we don’t play it is because we’re done with the game itself, and not:

sparc.3649:

- because if you have any “issues” on one server (say for example internal guild issues), you’re going to have them on ANY server you play on. Sure things being different may keep you enticed for a LITTLE bit longer, but you’re ultimately doomed to quit, just depends how many times you’re willing to rinse lather and repeat before you do.

This is a non-causal observation. It says nothing true about the real dynamics of a WvW guild in GW2.

sparc.3649:

PLAY to have FUN!

Exactly as we’ve done. Including the people who rode the death spiral to rank 24, then left, and regretted not leaving sooner.

( ° v °)

Liston.9708:

Drop may never occur….. (Well maybe not never, but won’t be before April changes)

( ° v °)

Well jiminy my glickos.

Ten Ton Hammer, 2014, Why I Stopped Playing Guild Wars 2

Thread suggestions are often not taking lessons from the past.

What I found so frustrating about Guild Wars 2 more than anything was that ArenaNet singlehandedly rejected some of the things that made the brand and the game great: Guild versus Guild and Dynamic Events. Where Dynamic Events are concerned, I believe they abandoned the process because it significantly reduced their revenue potential rather than the raw Living World model.

The above quote is the majority opinion of those who bought the game for WvW and then left before Desert Borderland. I’ve spoken with such people in the hundreds, as they were deciding to leave. The common theme was never so specific. It was simply that they were done. It had left them wanting (which indicates that the game was good) but they felt under-delivered as time passed. It didn’t hold them in the ways they felt it had promised.

Interestingly, ArenaNet did specifically address that quote with Heart of Thorns.

Perhaps the reason that the game is still leaking WvW players is something more fundamental, beneath the surface of all of these “top list” easy-mode answers that are guaranteed to make one party cheer at another party’s displeasure.

The fundamental problem I see:

• WvW is a diluted RvR
• scored by the 5v5 PvP capture-point system with longer distances between the points
• operating under the PvE combat ruleset
• with PvE reward bolted on through loot-drop and gold medals for being present.

It is a problem of staleness, from the original WvW design having now run its course. The top-list suggestions are all well and good, as they provide a sense of what will please the most people immediately.

Just don’t forget that the majority is not simply unaware of this thread. The majority left the game because they were done with the game, and the people who returned for HoT found that the game was exactly as they had left it; then they left again.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Karl is working specifically on WvW-focused skill balance. He’s looking for the wins for WvW that don’t screw the rest of the game.

Means there are still no (or very few) special conditions on WvW skill calculations for the fact that they’re occurring in WvW. In other words, WvW instances remain as PvE instances technically, and will not receive the behavioral or numeric separation that PvP receives, or as was done in the “special” case of Retaliation boon.

Any skill balance change they make will therefore be subject to the pleasure, acceptance, and arguments of PvE players who never enter WvW. Those players will judge the change by their own completely different perspective, and the changes must revert or compromise where they run into conflict.

Note that the fact that many players enjoy (or at least participate in, without necessary enjoyment of) both the PvE and WvW content does not indicate that these two systems should not be wholly separate in combat balance, just as the same is clearly accepted in comparison of PvE and PvP maths.

Yes, thank you for punishing the players that want and enjoy broken Tyrian PvE as a part of WvW. They deserved it, and WvW could use a lot more attention of exactly that nature.

The less PvE-style “contribution” in WvW, the better.

It’s poor pairing here, and that is inevitable. Elo would do the same thing.

Bearded.6485:

Saying that there use to be a full length novel thread about this subject

https://www.google.com/#q=site:forum-en.guildwars2.com+glicko+one+up+one+down

Bearded.6485:

and telling every one how easy it is to make a spreadsheet proving your point does nothing to actually prove your point.

Do you really need help with making a table that would plot 1up/down across multiple matches? I’m only putting the burden of proof on you, the claimant. I’m prepared to be proven wrong.

Bearded.6485:

I can say my crap smells like roses, but it doesn’t make it true.

I hope you get away with that, ‘cuz that’s the Bearded I got along with in TS.

Eternalight.4708:

Needless to say reading above the current glicko system seems to be working as intended but not functioning as it should? Am i reading that right?

Yep.

The way to understand it can be something like this: Look at the graph that TorquedSoul attached to OP, and understand that the curving is meant to enforce a diminishing return on both the upward and downward movement of a server’s ranking.

The effect is a form of loss/gain prevention. It intentionally prevents a server from gaining or losing “too much” ranking from a great or terrible performance in a single match. It forces the good or bad performance to be repeated, as a display of consistency on behalf of the server.

That is why ANet Glicko has been good for its purpose, and 1up would be terrible for the same purpose. 1up does an entirely different thing, for an entirely different purpose. ANet Glicko produces a good enough stability, and that’s what it’s meant to do.

The WvW leaderboard is actually just a table sort. The sort condition is “how do these servers perform against their peers, over time”. It is not a sports competition ladder.

What TorquedSoul has shown is that ANet should probably change the type of curve being applied, because the curve they use is too aggressive in punishing the winner and propping up the loser, in individual matches. He’s also shown that in spite of that fact, the servers still eventually get to the ranking they deserve, but they have to work too hard, or be beaten too badly, to get there.

If ANet Glicko didn’t work well enough to eventually rank a server properly, then TorquedSoul would have no data to prove his point with.

I’m not sure how much time (in other words, how many matches) would be trimmed from a situation like Dragonbrand vs Sea of Sorrows right now, if Torque’s change was made. What is certain, however, is that there would still be pain involved for the losing parties, and that is a part of this game type. That’s what you bought and wanted. 1up isn’t going to change that for the better, where loser’s or insufficient winner’s feels are concerned.

Bearded.6485:

There is no amount of PVF’N or glicko theory crafting that can prove or disprove if a 1 up 1 down concept would or would not work. The only way to know, is to try it, but that would a bit extreme at this point.

Try it in a spreadsheet, like we did the last time a full length novel thread on the subject wrote itself. It’s a very simple thought experiment, but if you need the numbers to slap you in the face, then that is easy to do.

Norbe.7630:

imagine Olympics or NBA or MOBA tourneys would use glicko, that would be disasterrific

that my friends is an effective way of saying “wtf”

You’re confusing WvW servers with teams in a regulated team sport. WvW is not regulated. The teams are of unequal size. The rules are too chaotic for a sport. Of course your analogy doesn’t make sense. The problem is the analogy, and not either WvW or ANet glicko.

WvW leaderboard is not supposed to change often. That’s the entire point of the thing.

Still, some people want 1-up-1-down because it’s very obvious looking and has an instant reward effect, like loot drops that force you to press the loot pickup key all night, and a gold, silver, or bronze medal for every moment you spend near a building or NPC.

How it would not work, and would break down, is more difficult because it is long-term thinking, and might send you into a spreadsheet to illustrate.

The problem with Dragonbrand right now would not be fixed by not using glicko to rank them. That problem is the fact that there are too few servers in the pool, regardless of the ranking method used, to offer every server a good match of two other servers. It is a hard problem, and you can not solve it with a new leaderboard concept. We’ve been over this before.

To ask for 1-up-1-down is effectively the same as asking to have the problem made worse, for more people.

Glicko system, as is done here, is a reflection of population and coverage, seen through how that influences PPT. The outcome of PPT across an entire week is determined primarily by which server has the most people focused on gaining PPT during the times when their opponents have fewer thusly focused people. The outcome is only secondarily determined by PPT gained through victories against roughly equal opponents.

The thought, “I want to fight new people”, is the primary reason to transfer to a different server.

The thought, “I want to win against these people”, is the primary reason to recruit transferring people into your server. That secondarily leads to eventually fighting against new people, as your server will either ascend the ladder or inspire your opponents to also recruit.

None of this is indicating that either server transfer or glicko ranking of servers are bad things which are wrongly used or implemented.

Sinbold.8723:

This has been standard since the introduction of the new maps. I made a post about it 2 months ago. These “bugs” make me believe even more that megaserver is coming to our beloved WvW.

Ah. Guess I was paying more attention, and looked for the tooltip on minimap, after the reticle bug. GG.

Could also be a party/squad issue. I was in neither. The guildmates who glitched were probably in party together. The guildmates who didn’t glitch were unlikely to be in that party; they were playing differently. It was an off night, so we weren’t in squad together.

Zachary Stiers.1879:

This should only be a cross-map visual bug. This means that some of the information you see from a different map might be wrong, but while playing on the map the objective is actually on information should all be correct. If this turns out to not be the case in any situation please let me know.

Maybe related, and not cross-map: Last night, on NA Tier 2 EBG, my maps where rendering guild mate dots as if they were “in different instances of this map”, complete with the lower resolution update frequency you would expect when that is true. Of course, it wasn’t true. They were in my instance of EBG, but approaching them until they were rendered in my client did not end that bug.

In the same play session, called target reticle was not rendering correctly. It was dark red on player characters and most combatant NPCs, bright (normal) red on some NPCs; mostly ambients. This was noticed by other players in the same map and time. Apparently it was not consistent across all connected clients.

It’s true that waiting for glicko to catch up is a painful experience. However, the necessary evil in it is the fact that it is the waiting which helps prevent player-intentional volatility. If the players are allowed to induce match changing volatility within one or two matches (again, the off-week/on-week problem) then it becomes possible for them to reliably coordinate a boom/bust cycle. If they only have to wait a week or two between phases of that oscillation, then it becomes inevitable that it will happen.

Waiting for glicko to catch up has been the deterrent from that behavior. That behavior is the reason that Yak’s Bend rose to Tier 1 last year, and it was Tarnished Coast’s refusal to be patient with the glicko rankings that stopped the cycle from happening.

The real reason that the NA ladder has such a different history as compared to the EU ladder, as shown in the narrower gaps between EU tiers, is that NA and EU players have a very different sense of sportsmanship for a game of this type. The NA players have always stacked the top servers to “full”, until there was no one left who could be convinced to do it, and they repeated that until now, when I get whispers from Tier 1 people scrounging desperately for people they can’t find.

1-up-1-down would drastically increase the frequency of (even more) imbalanced matches. For each tier, the middle server will tend to get stuck, and the #1 and #3 will tend to bounce constantly between their natural tier and the neighbor tier. I would expect the players to quickly realize that fact, then fall into a pattern of off-weeks and on-weeks where a majority would avoid the match following a 1-up that pushes them into a guaranteed curb-stomp loss. Counterpoint, of course, would be the karma train swap meet for the guaranteed win week. That’s what happens now, just less frequently.

1-up-1-down can work in competitions with 2 opponents per match. The third opponent is why it won’t work here. Furthermore, it gives no real weight to historical performance, and so it is too volatile.

It’s completely okay, for example, that NA Tier 1 servers have tended to stick in that tier, because history has proven that all three of them are nearly guaranteed to win if they match against any of three Tier 2 servers. That history is reflected in the wide separation between those tiers today. The fact that a Tier 2 server can inflate to Tier 1 population and activity was proven last year, by Yak’s Bend, and the fact that a fall from Tier 1 will deflate the server was proven most recently by Tarnished Coast.

The WvW leaderboard was not designed as a short-term competitive ladder. We, the players, turned it into a meta-competition, with websites like mos.millenium.org and our own behavior. That got reinforced by ArenaNet later, with their WvW seasonal tournaments, but they lock the leaderboards into leagues for those things because the leaderboard isn’t actually designed for it. It needs the league meta-tiers to make the tournament meaningful for anyone below tier 2, and it needs forced shuffling of servers during the tournament, because the rankings are intentionally designed to not do that.

ArenaNet’s use of a modified Glicko 2 ranking is purely for matching nearly equal opponents, where more than 3 opponents (servers) was also a systematic requirement of the original design, because they did not have a solid “megaserver” technology—which, by the way, is a fancy way of naming extremely redundant and wide network topologies, a/k/a, high-availability clusters, and “cloud”.

It was arguably more interesting to do it this way, with the server leaderboard, rather than forever lock a trio of servers into a perpetual battle. That was a novel spin on the Tri-Realm RvR concept, and it worked, for better and worse.

Every time a significantly imbalanced match has occurred, there has been no end to the complaints, up to and including that being one of the leading reasons for the deletion and banning of the old “matchup threads” here.

TorquedSoul has shown a way to improve the ranking method now, with data that didn’t exist 3.5 years ago, but aside from some slight changes like that, the method itself has always done what it is designed to do, in an appropriate time frame, given the fact that the matches each last 1 week. Torqued’s claim is very specific, and it isn’t that ArenaNet Glicko is the wrong thing to do. Rather, it’s that ArenaNet Glicko is doing a part of its job slightly wrong.

I don’t think that a simple ladder would do anything good for the week-to-week experience. The weekly competition of WvW is ideally between the three most-similar opponents; not some make-believe idea of an opponent that doesn’t exist, or one that would be fun to fight for one night until you realize that they have so many people logged in that you can’t possibly fight it.

Thanks for not letting me down, displayname.

No. KISS is not always the correct path, and 1-up-1-down is not better or more virtuous for being easily understood with basic arithmetic. This was shown, on this forum, years ago. It doesn’t work on this, a tiered ladder with 3-party matches. Thinking otherwise means you haven’t thought or worked through its consequences over time: the basic arithmetic, played out multiple times, for multiple matches, in sequence.

Unfortunate that this forum’s search is forever broken. This was a very longly debated subject back when ANet was still fiddling with the thing, and particularly at the month where they tightened their per-server random seed from 1.0 to 0.5. It was then shown here what a model of 1-up-1-down looks like over time in this, and it wasn’t good. That’s easy to replicate, if you’re interested. Just do it.

Trajan.4953:

All this geek talk is making me hot!

Seems like you could use some liquid cooling. :^)

Ansau.7326:

Straegen.2938:

Dusty Moon.4382:

It takes a redo of their game engine and that takes time.

It does not require a redo only an optimization of the API usage. They could add in some new routines which might be intensive but an initial move with optimization to DX11 is not a particularly large task for a gaming company.

I don’t think this would help much though. Their main bottleneck on the client seems to be tied to a main thread that is bound by network traffic. I wouldn’t say this is poor coding since MMO systems are very complex but certainly could use a redesign/rewrite which may indeed be a monumental task given their architecture.

API is the least of the troubles in this game.
Insane amount of calculations done in one or two threads is what is crushing the performance.

Same thing.

Straegen is talking about a theoretical (because he can’t see the source code, but a good assumption) API inside of Gw2.exe which abstracts the graphics work from the specific version of DirectX being used. That would be the way in which a game engine would normally handle using multiple versions of DirectX and OpenGL.

Straegen is also talking about a main thread (loop), where most of the draw/render calls to that API would trace their roots too, which appears to bind (block) on network traffic. He means that there is a blocking input/output cycle in Gw2.exe’s main loop, and that cycle is getting stuck on waiting for server data over the Internet.

I’d agree with him, on both points, and add that there’s really no escape from the second point in online games that do real-time simulation. Even when the loop doesn’t block, you’re still going to get nasty surprises during above-average desync. Things like skill activation lag and player teleports, when either the server CPU chokes or your uplink is dropping packets.

DeceiverX.8361:

The 970 will pretty much tackle any modern game.

Of course it will, and that’s not the point. Looking years ahead is the point. That’s why I said what I said, in the way I said it, which you aren’t addressing as I said it.

You’re making it an argument that wasn’t available until you misconstrued what I said.

DeceiverX.8361:

The whole 500 mb slower vRAM thing is largely untrue from the technical level and many optimizations have been made since release to make this pretty much a non-issue.

That’s absolutely false, and the entire reason the 970 line exists is to allow manufacturers to disable defective portions of the 980, as part of the QA process of lot/bin testing on the GTX 980 assembly lines, and then still sell them as 970 because the device still works, but only to the 970 spec and with the changes that makes it a 970 and not a 980.

It’s not just about the VRAM partitioning thing. The 970 is a weaker spec, with lower quality standard, and you aren’t “getting a great deal” with it. You’re getting what you paid for.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy it. Read again the thing you quoted and misconstrued.

Mortar incendiary rounds’ AoE fire still doesn’t have a red circle indicator on the ground.

That’s why so many ppl down to it. You’re welcome.

LetoII.3782:

I’ve had a few cards in for this game, Anything stronger than a gtx660 is wasted,, Unless you’re supporting multiple monitors. Better to buy a liquid cooler for your cpu and overclock.

This

Leto is kinda low balling it on what would be a waste for GPU, but that’s the gist of it, and this is what you should actually do if upgrading for GW2:

Go here: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

Get the best single-thread performing CPU you can, which fits the hardware you already have.

After that, tune the GPU and game graphics settings for what that allows.

Otherwise, you’re looking at building a whole new rig, and that gets you into similar decision making with very different outcomes. Right now, you’re either spending big or waiting to see more back-and-forth between the manufacturers.

If you’re buying new this year, you’re looking at boards with PCIe 3.0 slots, DDR4 RAM slots, and (if you aren’t an AMD loyalist) LGA 1151 CPU sockets.

On the GPU, if you’re looking at Nvidia, you’re buying GTX980 or waiting for the next series to bump its price down, because 970s are just defective and kitten 980s, which like 960s will not carry you through a few years of new games.

Boreal.9826:

It was either that, or nerf the damage hard.

Right. That alternative is what should have happened, and I’m saying that as someone who doesn’t play Revenant.

For large scale combat, this internal cooldown option effectively acts as a too-frequent RNG chance for the skill to be wasted. That is taking away player agency, and the source of that felt pain will be your allied players standing next to you.

The excuses and solutions for that consequence are appropriate for how sPvP plays out. It is, however, completely inexcusable and against the spirit of how RvR should play.

In RvR, the discouragement for amassing a zerg should come from what the opponent can do to you, not what your allies can prevent you from doing. That was the reasoning for a lot of the choices ArenaNet made in designing (or not designing in) various mechanics of WvW in general, and that is what should apply to how the class and skill mechanics work in WvW.

That’s also why WvW deserves a separate ruleset for mechanics and balance; just like sPvP, perhaps even more aggressively different.

Boreal.9826:

Now at least you won’t receive anywhere near as many complaints about being one shot in WvW. A good compromise, in my opinion.

If the game design revolves around shutting complainers up, then there are many bad compromises being made for all involved parties.

Besides, this did nothing to stop “one shot”, and there are a lot of other imbalance issues leading to that. Some new ones were just patched in, even.