Xeeron – Strike Force
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You are dead on. The uneven player distribution among servers is the real problem behind “night capping”.
It is aggravated by two issues:
1. PPT are not adjusted for players online.
If they adjusted the PPT for players online, servers that were evenly matched ON AVERAGE, would have pretty much even scores. Since the PPT is not adjusted, minor differences can have a huge impact. E.g. two servers with almost the same WvW population. Lets say server 2 has 95% of the population of server 1. If that 5% difference is during a period of low population online for both servers, it can easily translate to server 1 having twice as much people online for 8 hours compared to server 2. Which in turn means that server 2 will never win a weakly match, ever.
Due to the current unadjusted PPT system, servers need not only be evenly matched, they need to be evenly matched during each part of the day. That is very hard to achieve and will lead to unbalanced results for most matchups.
2. There is not enough of an underdog bonus
You want to give the underdog an advantage in your game. They are the worse team, so they need some help to be able to compete. Otherwise, you’ll end up with very unbalanced matches.
The main underdog bonus in GW2 is the fact that it is a 3 way match. The 2 lower servers should team up on the current leader, making it easier for the underdogs and harder for the leader. In theory, this should work fine. However, in practise, several issues prevent it from working.
- Playing for second
Several matches are decided quickly after 2-3 days. For the rest of the week, the main competitor of #2 is not #1, but #3. It becomes not a match to win, but a match not to lose and be send to a lower tier. Instead of teaming up on the winner, the opposite happens.
- Giving up maps
Due to low population, servers give up entire maps. Once pushed to the spawn, the spawn camping team has an overwhelming advantage over the camped team. So the underdog has a very hard time getting back into the game once they are pushed out.
- Orbs
This has been repeated ad nauseum on the forums, but is still true. The orbs act as a
huge underdog DISadvantage.
In my mind, simply adjusting PPT for total players online and changing the orb bonus (to something that is a nice reward for the players, but not helping them in WvW) alone are two simple changes that would alleviate a large part of the imbalances that make current WvW boring for all but the first 2 days.
- Xeeron
Xeeron – Strike Force
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