Guild Wars 2

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Mike-Ferguson-Queue-Times/first#post350448

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Mike-Ferguson-Queue-Times/first#post350448

Thanks for the response, Colin. I appreciate it. That could help forestall some arguments that pop up regarding server populations and why servers keep losing. The common argument is that the server has too few people remaining to field enough people for WvWvW to hit the cap, let alone build a queue because all their people leave for better servers that win more.

If in truth the majority are moving to lower-queue-time servers and not just jumping to whichever server trounced them that week, then the common argument would appear to be wrong, based on actual data rather than conjecture. At least, the reason typically given for the lack of WvWvW participation is incorrect.

Again, thank you. It’s always a welcome sight when an ArenaNet employee responds with useful information.

What I’d really like to see are transfer counts, including where most of the transfers off a given server went to, correlated with which servers were matched with which per time period, and who won that week.

I.e., I’d like to see data that supports or refutes the idea that the majority of transfers are from losing to winning servers.

Moa Malady.3176:

Who wants to bet that everyone opposed to forced balance is on a server that’s already winning? Or at least, doesn’t actually know how very, very difficult it is to get back from a losing battle?

Define “losing battle”.

At what point do you consider your server to be in a “losing battle”?

Why weren’t you trying harder before that point, when it would have been easier to recover?

Because you’d rather blame the game than accept any blame yourselves.

Yes, the server I’m on happened to win our match this week. However, that’s not typically the case. More often than not, we lose. And I don’t mean we come in second whenever we lose, either. Sometimes we’re last, and by a huge margin.

Honestly, it doesn’t change my attitude one bit. When we’re behind, I queue up anyway. I go in and do what I can. So do a lot of other people on my server. We disrupt supply caravans. We take supply depots. We pick off enemy stragglers. We create large-scale distractions on one side of the map to draw the enemy zerg away from our true target, a much smaller, less attractive target on the opposite side of the map. We do all sorts of things to scrape and claw and gain back any territory we can.

And, just for the record, the team that came in second in our match this week fought to the very end with us. They’ve put up a great fight, and they’ve even gained ground in the past 24 hours. The match will end tomorrow even closer than it is between our two servers now.

And we have great respect for the fact that they did that. Several of us have, in fact, thanked them publicly for the great fight they gave us. They get it. So do several other servers. But most of them don’t.

I know exactly how hard it can be to come back from a huge deficit. The point is not to let it get to that point to begin with. Sometimes it’s inevitable; sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it. Much like life, it isn’t fair, but it is something you’ve got to deal with. You can’t always win. Sometimes you can’t even come in a close second. Sometimes you’re going to get soundly trounced.

Suck it up. Learn from it. Soldier on.

…or, roll over, expose your pink belly, and cry ‘foul’ while demanding that ArenaNet do something about the simple truth that the majority of people on your server simply lack the intestinal fortitude to stick around when things get hard. That they’re afraid. That they aren’t good enough to at least lose with some honor and dignity.

You may still lose, but you can make sure your enemy remembers and respects you.

Or you can lose, and ensure that you’re forgotten and ridiculed, even pitied for your complete lack of effort. People may suggest taking a can of paint and a brush into the datacenter and painting a large, yellow stripe right down the center of your server blade.

Which one occurs is entirely up to you.

I just want to thank SoS for hanging in there. You could have pulled a GoM and just given up, but you didn’t. Thank you for that. You still lost, but you put up a good fight to the end, and that should be acknowledged.

Thank you, SoS. Keep up the good work. Perhaps we’ll wind up matched with you again sometime.

Daish.6139:

you dont know what your talking about

there is a large population that are willing to play as long as they have a chance

these are the players your loseing

the other type of players that leave when they are loseing are not important

Actually, I know precisely what I’m talking about. You’re so myopic in pushing your particular agenda you’re just blind to what anyone who doesn’t happen to agree with you is saying.

When a server loses by 200,000 points, they didn’t start the match down by 200,000 points. They started at an even score. They may have slowly slipped down by 10,000 or 20,000 after a day or two.

And that’s when the players on that server quit queuing. And because they quit queuing, they drop back even further.

“Why are we losing?”
“We don’t have enough players!”
“Why don’t we have enough players?”
“Because we’re losing!”

You see, when people quit queuing for WvWvW at the first sign that their server is falling behind, it guarantees the server’s going to lose, because the server is full of a bunch of quitters.

Quitters will not win. They cannot win. And honestly, they don’t deserve to win.

If you want to win WvWvW, figure out a way to motivate the player base to queue. That’s something that the server population is responsible for, not ArenaNet. It’s not ArenaNet’s fault that you’re on a server full of people who feel so entitled, so spoiled, that they need to be externally motivated just to participate when they’re down by a few tens of thousands of points. And it’s not their responsibility.

Want to win? Stay in the fight. Stop quitting at the first sign of trouble. Stop giving up.

You won’t hear this; you can’t. You’re so certain your solution is the one and only solution to the problem, you simply refuse to even entertain any other possibility.

But the simple fact is this: A 200,000 point loss starts with a 20,000 point deficit. And that’s something a server can recover from. But only if they actually bother to try.

Stop behaving like each player on a losing server needs an individual hug from an ArenaNet developer and a pep talk so they can believe that they’re special, they’re unique, and they’re good.

If you want participation trophies, go join…well, just about anything these days. Society has devolved to the point where people have to be given gifts just to try. It’s the societal equivalent of being bribed to eat your broccoli, or to go to the dentist.

That sort of misguided mollycoddling most certainly should not be promulgated further in a video game, for crying out loud. It’s something you play voluntarily, to enjoy yourself. If you can’t figure out how to enjoy yourself when you’re not winning, go talk to pretty much anyone in WvWvW on the Kaineng server. They seem to manage to have a good time, and they ALWAYS lose. It’s a foregone conclusion. But they make the best of it.

Your problem isn’t that you think WvWvW is broken; your problem is that you think everything should be equal at all times. I’ve got news for you: In WvWvW, two of the three servers in any match MUST ALWAYS LOSE. Two thirds of all participants will lose in every single match, every time.

There will be a winner, and there will be two servers of losers.

Right now, a fair number of those losers are taking it extremely gracelessly. Rather than plucking the beam from your own eye, you’re too busy looking for beams anywhere else you possibly can.

Have some humility and grace, and realize that if you lost, the reason and the blame don’t lie in the game mechanics. They lie in the simple fact that the majority of the population on your server that participates in WvWvW quits at the first sign of trouble. They run like cowards back to PvE, waiting for the match to end. They don’t have the guts to stay and fight.

Remember, that 200,000 point loss started because a whole bunch of people on your server decided it was better to run and hide rather than stay and fight when the deficit was a measly 20,000.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “The avalanche has started; it’s too late for the pebbles to vote”? Well, that avalanche is what results in the 200,000 point loss. The time for the pebbles to vote is when you’re down by 10,000 or 20,000 points. And unless and until that vote is something other than, “We’re losing; let’s go grind DEs or something until next week’s match”, you’ll continue to be buried under that avalanche.

And — I don’t mean to be picky, but you’ve done it for a week now, and it grates on my nerves — the proper use of the term you’re looking for is “you’re”. It’s a contraction of “you are”. If you must insult someone, do please try to at least use proper grammar. It lessens the irony somewhat.

Shredicus.8706:

mcl.9240:

I didn’t move any goalposts. I was ALWAYS talking about overall server population, and GoM’s being unwilling to queue for WvWvW once they started losing. That’s not a problem with game mechanics, that’s a problem with the people on your server being, for lack of a better word and to be quite blunt about it, quitters.

Personally, I believe after a decade or so of online video games that have absolutely zero penalties for people simply quitting a game as soon as they start losing, there’s a generation of gamers out there who approach everything that way. Not winning? Quit. Can’t seem to get ahead? Quit. Looks like you’re going to have to actually put effort into gaining ground? Quit.

Quit and blame the system, rather than yourselves.

What GoM does — heck, what every server seems to do as soon as they get surpassed by a 30,000-50,000 point lead (TC is as guilty of this as anyone), is simply give up. It’s as though the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy, found the Germans dug in, started getting shot at, and turned around and got back into the boats and went home.

If your server is behind, you should have enough personal pride and integrity to get in there and fight harder, not give up. You should redouble your efforts to get people into WvWvW that week, to take back what you’ve lost and regain lost ground and try to close the score gap. So what if you don’t win? At least you put up a good fight! Perhaps you’ll lose by 10,000 points rather than 200,000.

The psychology is quite different though. There are no stakes. There are no consequences for losing or winning other than a click of a button to transfer to the winning server. There is no SERVER PRIDE for a losing server, just bandwagoning to a winning server.

And that goes away as soon as they eliminate free server transfers. Which, for all that is good and right in this world, should be rather soon.

What they should do is simply eliminate the points entirely.

They can continue to use them for server groupings for matchmaking, but don’t show scores, period. Keep the pie chart and the stacked horizontal bar graph. Do away with showing the players ANY numerical indicator of position during a match.

When providing the list of server groupings on the forums, do not put them in order; randomize them within brackets, and randomize the order the brackets are presented.

Simple technical change, and it fixes the entire mentality that says WvWvW is all about points and being the top anything on a top anything.

WvWvW becomes about winning your match that week (or whatever the time period eventually becomes; at this rate I’m doubting they’ll move to a two-week matchup), and wondering who’ll you’ll face the next time ’round.

It also solves the issue with server-hopping, because people won’t just hop up brackets.

Wyrdthane.6801:

@ mcl :" You’re simply wrong there. Success isn’t a motivation. Success is the result of motivation."

You are correct. This is a matter of motivation, and the proof of this is in the pudding.

People swapping servers because they feel motivated by the chance to fight on a server that has a chance of winning.

all they want is a “fighting chance” and moving to a new server that seems to be in a good position to be matched up fairly is the only way of doing that right now.

maybe the solution for Anet is to keep the server transfers free… could you imagine how many customers they might loose if they simply dont want to play the game anymore because its gonna cost them money to switch to a server with a “fighting chance” ?

probably a few might be the answer.

If you’re going to discuss this with me, at least be intellectually honest about it. people don’t transfer servers so they’ll be on a server that “seems to be in a good position to be matched up fairly.” People swap servers from the losing server to the winning server.

The people you’re discussing in your last post don’t want a fair shot. They want to be on the server that crushes the competition. They want the prestige of being associated with that server, even though they themselves have done absolutely nothing to contribute to it. They want to share in the glory without putting in any of the effort.

In short, they want the easy way out.

I sincerely hope ArenaNet eliminates free server transfers and does it very, very soon. Because then, and only then, will people be faced with the choice of either paying for that “easy way out”, or actually toughing it out and trying to make a go of the hand they’ve been dealt.

Do you think I complain about the temperature when I miss a lift? Or how little sleep I got the night before, or how I didn’t eat enough that day, or how I’ve been sick, or how everything hurts so much I just want to take a handful of painkillers and down it with a glass of scotch just to get through the day?

No. I admit I missed the lift because I wasn’t strong enough, and I decide to do better.

I don’t blame my teammates. I don’t change gyms. I don’t use my age as an excuse. I play the hand I was dealt, and I do the best possible job I can with it, because it’s what I’ve got. And when all is said and done, I’ll be left with a few records, a few medals, my name on a few lists here and there, and a broken-down body that will probably need extra medical attention the rest of my life, and make the next 40 years quite a bit more painful than they need to be.

But I’ll also be left with the pride of knowing that I accomplished something. That I did what I set out to achieve, and I did it with dignity and honor and grace and that I saw it through, using what I had rather than making excuses for everything I didn’t. Knowing that I stuck with a team that, while still comprised of some of the strongest people in the nation, is eclipsed by a team about two hours away that’s better at self-promotion and more well-known due to a certain movie made earlier in the decade about the guy who started it. Sure, I could drive over there 3-4 times a week and ride their coattails, but I’d rather stay with the people who’ve stuck by me, because I think they’ve got more guts and integrity than anyone else I’ve ever had the pleasure of training with.

AsteriskCGY.5931:

Putting in the effort’s easy. I’m there, i’m killing folks, I’m moving supplies, etc. What you’re looking for is motivation. And some semblance of success is one of them.

You’re simply wrong there. Success isn’t a motivation. Success is the result of motivation.

I’m going to do something I normally don’t do, and disclose a tiny bit about myself. I’m a nationally-ranked competitive powerlifter. I’m also in my mid-40s.

I work a 9-5 job 5 days a week, and commute 1-1.5 hours EACH WAY to get to the office and back.

Two days a week, I go directly from the office and train with my team for 2-3 solid hours. On Saturday mornings, I wake up very early so as not to wake my spouse, crawl out of bed, throw on my gym clothes, and drive an hour to my team’s private gym, to train AGAIN, for 2-3 hours straight, and then drive home and get some lunch with her.

Sometimes I’ll also train a fourth day. Sometimes I won’t. Because I have a steel plate and 5 screws in my arm from when my forearm snapped in half in the middle of a bench press. I spent two years and thousands of dollars dealing with excruciating pain from the surgery to fix the break and attach that plate. There were times I thought I should just quit. While other people on my team were benching 600lbs, 700lbs, or more, I was struggling in the mid-400s, and couldn’t do it without screaming at least once from the pain during each set.

When I’m not dealing with that, I have an SI joint that pops out of joint so regularly I’m on a first name basis with my chiropractor. It popped out during a 700lb squat two weeks ago, and over the course of the week the pain got so bad I couldn’t shift position in my chair without almost passing out from the pain. My wife had to help me to stand up and sit down. When even I couldn’t take it any more, I looked at her last Saturday night (after I spent 10 minutes just getting out of my chair after playing GW2 and going upstairs to lie on the couch while she made dinner) and asked her to take me to the emergency room so I could get some pain meds so I could sleep that night.

My rotator cuff tends to lock up hard on me sometimes, to the point that I can’t raise my right arm.

Those are just the injuries. I’ve been so sore after training I couldn’t undress myself; I was literally incapable of bending over to untie my shoes, and have to occasionally ask my wife to do it. There are days the best I can manage is a very slow limp/waddle rather than walking like a normal human.

I’ve dropped a 405lb barbell from full arm extension directly onto my throat. After my teammates yanked it off me, I laughed, grimaced, sat up, and got on with training.

If I did anything motivated by success, I would have quit YEARS ago.

What motivates me is a burning, sometimes overwhelming desire to be better than I am. To overcome obstacles put in my path, whether they’re injuries, or just ordinary pain, or the little surprises life is constantly throwing at you (some of which have resulted in stitches I’ve ripped during training after going almost immediately from post-op to the gym).

I’m not motivated by success. I’m motivated to know what I’m capable of. I’m motivated to find out what my limits are, and then push myself past those limits. I’m motivated to look all those people in the eye that think I’m old and laugh in their face. I’m motivated to hit a personal goal of squatting 1,000 lbs in competition before I hit 50. Of achieving my pro total. Of being better tomorrow than I am today.

Success? There’s no such thing. There’s only accomplishing what you set out to accomplish, and then establishing newer, tougher goals to reach. Motivation is that inner fire than consumes you to reach those goals.

There’s no external reward in this. There’s zero money in powerlifting, even at the pro level (I take that back, actually; I’d say the top three people in the sport worldwide may have earned $25,000 all together in the past year). I spend thousands of dollars each year on equipment. Thousands more on meet registration and travel. You do NOT want to see my grocery budget (I walk around at 285 and compete at 275; soon I’ll be moving up to 308). And I won’t even discuss the money I spend on medical bills. The bill for my room when I broke my arm was $97,000. That was just the room. That didn’t include the surgery, or any of the doctors’ fees. Nor any of the post-op care or rehab.

So don’t sit there and talk to me about needing external motivation to be better in a VIDEO GAME. If you can’t find motivation within yourself, there is nothing that will motivate you. You either have a drive to do better and be better, or you do not. No amount of external reward is going to make it any easier for you.

AsteriskCGY.5931:

Hahahahaha no.

World pride can only go so far. Not everyone is enamored with how their server looks in the world. People want to get paid for their time.

Then people should get a job. As the popular saying in this thread goes, “this is a game.”

It is entirely possible and fun for a losing team to keep on playing.

Here’s why it isn’t, in your eyes: You use the score to measure “fun”.

Ignore the score. I sincerely wish it wasn’t in the game. It ruins WvWvW for all concerned. “Fun” is what you make it.

Kaineng face that situation all the time. Go talk to them about how they manage to have fun anyway.

And as far as incentivizing people goes, the opportunity to fight for your server should be all the incentive you need. Any of you lot that feel you need your hand held and a big hug to feel better about yourselves to make you queue up need to go turn in your man card.

By the way, there is ONE server that exemplifies exactly the sort of stick-to-it-iveness I’m discussing, and if it weren’t for the fact that I love the server I’m on, I’d transfer there: Kaineng.

They have THE lowest population of any NA server. They are ranked dead last in WvWvW.

Know what? They don’t give up. They go into WvWvW knowing they’re not only the underdog, but almost certainly completely outclassed, and they try anyway. They give everything they’ve got.

And they still lose. But here’s the secret: THEY HAVE FUN DOING IT.

Kaineng, I salute you. You exemplify everything that’s RIGHT about WvWvW, and how it should be played. I only wish everyone else had your server’s spirit.

Is RUN still there, or have they decided to leave already?

Wyrdthane.6801:

mcl.9240:

Wyrdthane.6801:

re; mcl,

of course, but this is a game not real life. and honestly it is much more fun for all parties involved (winner and looser) to have a more balanced fight.

why bother even fighting if your loosing 500,000 points. which is the current problem on some servers..

the winning team gets bored for 2 weeks… TWO WHOLE WEEKS!!!!!!!

thats just not fun. something is broken when a GAME is NOT FUN.

Yes, it’s a game. It’s a game you lose if you don’t try.

You didn’t start the match week down by 500,000 points. You got there because everyone on your server QUIT. Plain and simple.

I’ll repeat it, since you missed it:
“Why are we losing?”
“We don’t have enough people!”
“Why don’t we have enough people?”
“Everyone quit queuing because we were losing!”

…it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That cycle starts when a server is down by about 20,000 points or so. Which is a completely recoverable shortfall. But since kids these days (yes, I’m old) seem to think quitting is preferable to losing, and since they’ve been raised to believe everyone should win, you all just give up. And then you blame the game rather than yourselves for losing.

Here’s the truth: You lost because you quit. And you quit because you thought you were losing.

Want to win? Stay and fight. Don’t run away crying like a coward, and demand the game be changed to make you feel better about the fact that every single match, 2/3s of all servers in GW2 will lose.

Losing sucks. Nobody likes to lose. But 2/3rds of everyone playing this game MUST lose every week. There can be only one winner in each bracket of 3 servers.

The only solution to losing is to suck it up and try harder. Or resign yourself to the fact that you will continue to lose in perpetuity. That’s been true since time immemorial.

ok, you are %100 correct about this.

but what you are not seeing, is that this is a game. If people are not having fun, they move on.

while you seem to be confusing a video game with a sport. Lets boil this down to, if you love the game, and want it to stay around as long as WoW has, then you should nurse and care for its players,, EVEN THE WHINERS that you would kick out if you could. They want to have fun too.

I do understand it’s a game.

What you seem to be missing is that it can be fun to fight and come from behind.

The fact that servers lose by 200,000 points (something happening in my bracket this week) is due to the fact that the players on that server give up when the deficit was 10,000 or 20,000, not 200,000.

That’s not “not having fun”, that’s, “we’re not winning, so I refuse to play.”

It’s not fun to lose. I get that. But it can be not only fun, but immensely gratifying, to fight against the odds and come out on top anyway. The problem is that nobody seems to want to have that sort of fun. The only fun they want is “we win”.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a lot of people in WvWvW are acting like spoiled children. If they’re not winning, they quit. They quit quickly, and they quit at the first sign that they’re falling behind. They don’t have the character, the intestinal fortitude, the whatever-you-want-to-call it to stick with it through a bad situation and see it through to the end, come what may.

This very same attitude is rampant in those people who jump ship to a new server, a winning server, as soon as they possibly can.

The problem isn’t the game. The problem is a whole lot of the people playing the game. They ONLY want to win, but they don’t want to have to work for it. They just want to waltz into a winning situation and lord it over the losers.

This same attitude is prevalent in those people who want post-level-cap gear progression, so they can feel superior to everyone else based on what they own, rather than the skill they have.

It’s humorous, really: these very same people complain when they’re winning by too much, because everyone else quit and they have no one left to feel superior to. No cannon fodder to feed on. No lesser players to beat up. They’re king of the hill, and there’s no one there to be jealous of them.

There’s a reason why Roman heroes used to have a slave walk behind them, holding a laurel wreath over their head, whispering in their ear, “All glory is fleeting.”

Seems a whole bunch of folks these days want permanent glory, and nothing but.

Wyrdthane.6801:

re; mcl,

of course, but this is a game not real life. and honestly it is much more fun for all parties involved (winner and looser) to have a more balanced fight.

why bother even fighting if your loosing 500,000 points. which is the current problem on some servers..

the winning team gets bored for 2 weeks… TWO WHOLE WEEKS!!!!!!!

thats just not fun. something is broken when a GAME is NOT FUN.

Yes, it’s a game. It’s a game you lose if you don’t try.

You didn’t start the match week down by 500,000 points. You got there because everyone on your server QUIT. Plain and simple.

I’ll repeat it, since you missed it:
“Why are we losing?”
“We don’t have enough people!”
“Why don’t we have enough people?”
“Everyone quit queuing because we were losing!”

…it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That cycle starts when a server is down by about 20,000 points or so. Which is a completely recoverable shortfall. But since kids these days (yes, I’m old) seem to think quitting is preferable to losing, and since they’ve been raised to believe everyone should win, you all just give up. And then you blame the game rather than yourselves for losing.

Here’s the truth: You lost because you quit. And you quit because you thought you were losing.

Want to win? Stay and fight. Don’t run away crying like a coward, and demand the game be changed to make you feel better about the fact that every single match, 2/3s of all servers in GW2 will lose.

Losing sucks. Nobody likes to lose. But 2/3rds of everyone playing this game MUST lose every week. There can be only one winner in each bracket of 3 servers.

The only solution to losing is to suck it up and try harder. Or resign yourself to the fact that you will continue to lose in perpetuity. That’s been true since time immemorial.

One reason I always choose to play on RP servers is because the players on RP servers generally tend to be a slightly older demographic, and are typically more mature. This benefits me in several ways:

1) The odds of finding a guild whose members share similar schedules and responsibilities (i.e., work, family, a life outside the game) are higher

2) The overall server community tends to be friendlier and more helpful

3) People as a whole seem more intelligent (let’s face it, roleplaying is something that requires a fair bit of thought and creativity) and dedicated to their character(s).

4) The population is a bit more stable, since there’s a common bond among the server population that keeps them there long-term.

5) There’s a distinct reduction in the type of griefing you find on other servers (anything from abusive and foul language in public chat, to offensive names, and so forth).

This isn’t just true of GW2; it tends to hold true on most games I’ve played where there was a choice of a RP server, official or otherwise.

And those are just some of the many reasons TC is a great home. Not just for WvWvW, but overall.

Problem: People quit when they’re losing.
Proposed solution: Reward people for losing.
Result: Everyone is a special snowflake.

This has already been tried in many communities over the past 20 years. It’s why we have things like “participation trophies” now.

People need to learn two simple facts:
1) In any competition, one side (or in this case, two sides) must lose.
2) If they don’t like losing, quitting only guarantees that they continue to lose.

The solution to losing isn’t to coddle the losers to make them feel better.

The solution to losing is that the losers must realize they have to stay and fight if they want a chance at winning.

“Why are we losing?”
“We don’t have enough people!”
“Why don’t we have enough people?”
“Everyone quit queuing because we were losing!”

…it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Daish.6139:

mcl.9240:

There is always a chance. There is only no chance when everyone gives up. You don’t need external motivations to fight. If you do, that’s a sad state of affairs.

your talking out of your butt

when its 100vs20vs10 you dont have a chance

when its 35vs10vs15 you have a chance

there needs to be limits its 1v1v1 not 1v1

there needs to be a cap on the ammount of players based on how many are on the other teams

the server that knows they are weaker if they have smart commanders will focus on the stronger server and avoid the weaker server when possible

if players/guilds are really into WvW there is nothing stoping them from transfering their home server to play in a lower population server

There do not need to be limits. There need to be servers full of people who aren’t quitters; who refuse to give up when they start falling behind.

You do not fix psychological shortcomings with game mechanics.

If it’s that imbalanced, it didn’t start that way. It wound up that way because the people on the losing teams are quitters, plain and simple. They don’t want to lose, they don’t like to lose. Their solution to losing is to quit. They fail to realize that if they don’t want to lose, they should fight to win.

There is always a chance. There is only no chance when everyone gives up. You don’t need external motivations to fight. If you do, that’s a sad state of affairs.

I didn’t move any goalposts. I was ALWAYS talking about overall server population, and GoM’s being unwilling to queue for WvWvW once they started losing. That’s not a problem with game mechanics, that’s a problem with the people on your server being, for lack of a better word and to be quite blunt about it, quitters.

Personally, I believe after a decade or so of online video games that have absolutely zero penalties for people simply quitting a game as soon as they start losing, there’s a generation of gamers out there who approach everything that way. Not winning? Quit. Can’t seem to get ahead? Quit. Looks like you’re going to have to actually put effort into gaining ground? Quit.

Quit and blame the system, rather than yourselves.

What GoM does — heck, what every server seems to do as soon as they get surpassed by a 30,000-50,000 point lead (TC is as guilty of this as anyone), is simply give up. It’s as though the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy, found the Germans dug in, started getting shot at, and turned around and got back into the boats and went home.

If your server is behind, you should have enough personal pride and integrity to get in there and fight harder, not give up. You should redouble your efforts to get people into WvWvW that week, to take back what you’ve lost and regain lost ground and try to close the score gap. So what if you don’t win? At least you put up a good fight! Perhaps you’ll lose by 10,000 points rather than 200,000.

Waterbear.2764:

mcl.9240:

So what changed? Are you claiming that TC and SoS have so many more people that play during non-NA primetime hours than you do on weekdays? Clearly SoS does; they’re an Oceanic server. TC, on the other hand, doesn’t. TC has a fairly poor non-primetime presence.

The official queue time graphs for GoM show that you actually tend to play during NA non-primetime

Stop right there, did you even look at the graph you linked? You have the audacity to say we don’t have a population problem? First, that graph only goes till the 18th at which point there was no queue on 2 of the 4 possible destinations. Second, you will notice that the login was on a steady decline as the graph progresses.

I can say, first hand, I haven’t had to queue once this week, not even at match startup. Also, as already stated 90% of the time we run with the outmanned. Crap, I remember running with 20 TCCM, taking and holding a keep and two towers and we still had the outmanned the whole time.

I don’t care if the graph shows that we HAD a decent pop, because right now we don’t HAVE one, and the graph indicates just that. It shows a steady decline, and as much as you want to puff your chest and act as if this defeat is some righteous act delivered from a hand on high, we were destined to lose from the start. We simply don’t have the numbers.

Yes, I looked at it. That week the cheaters once again gave you a temporary lead early on, and by Monday you were losing, and your participation dropped precipitously due to that.

That graph does not show SERVER population. It shows server population participation in WvWvW, and even then, it only shows queue size. The times when your queues were empty, you still had people in WvWvW. You could have been at WvWvW map capacity and had 0 on that graph, simply because there weren’t people waiting in the queue to get in. It says nothing about how many are already in, or how many are on the server.

My post, however, discussed why those on your server — and you clearly have enough to have all map queues very high on weekends — decide to simply give up as soon as you don’t look like you’re leading any more.

And there you go again with the “we’re destined to lose” rhetoric.

With an attitude like that, no wonder GoM loses and has trouble getting its server population — which is more than large enough to fill all maps’ queues — to participate in WvWvW.

How about we just disable free server transfers entirely, and move to the paid model that was supposed to be in place to begin with?

I’m surprised ArenaNet’s ignoring such a large potential cash cow.

And yes, anyone transferring should be barred from WvWvW on their new home until the next match starts.

If the majority of the servers will be super casual non-competitive servers, then there should be fairly even matches by your logic.

It’s not a population issue; it’s a motivation issue. There isn’t a server in GW2 that has so few people on it that they couldn’t have full queues 24/7/365. That includes GoM. It’s just that people don’t queue up.

On most servers, people don’t have full queues 24/7/365 because people sleep, have families, have jobs, and generally have commitments outside the game. But they’re there during whatever can be considered a given server’s “prime time”.

On GoM, however, the people on your server have simply decided to stop queuing altogether, even during prime time. There’s a reason for that, and it isn’t the number of people on your server. It’s that the people on your server are demoralized.

There’s not a mechanical, in-game fix to a psychological problem on your server. For better or worse, GoM got tainted as “that server with all the flying/speedhacking hackers”. That put some people off queuing right there, because they didn’t want to be associated with that behavior.

I’m assuming the rest of the people who aren’t bothering to queue on GoM anymore are doing it because they just don’t bother; they assume they’re going to lose, and — no surprise, with that as the starting assumption — GoM loses.

As long as the GoM population keeps looking for outside fixes — changes to WvWvW, changes to server transfers, a sudden influx of new people — to solve your WvWvW problems, this will continue.

The only people who can fix the problem with the lack of WvWvW queuing on GoM are the people on GoM. And, I’ll say it again: GoM has more than enough people on the server to fill queues 24/7/365.

It’s called discounting in cognitive psychology. Hyperbolic is merely the description of the function which describes the discounting curve.

@Waterbear: I’m saying that your server was neck and neck the first few days with TC and SoS. It being the weekend isn’t an excuse, because it was a weekend for TC and SoS as well; you held your own.

So what changed? Are you claiming that TC and SoS have so many more people that play during non-NA primetime hours than you do on weekdays? Clearly SoS does; they’re an Oceanic server. TC, on the other hand, doesn’t. TC has a fairly poor non-primetime presence.

The official queue time graphs for GoM show that you actually tend to play during NA non-primetime (https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/6532/Gate_of_Madness.PNG). For whatever reason, however, GoM seems to give up rather quickly. You have the server population necessary to have large WvWvW queues; your players just choose not to queue when you’re losing. Moreso than on other servers.

Perhaps the server’s reputation, and your opponents’ response to it (since the behavior always seems to occur at or near the start of a match) plays a role in that. I honestly couldn’t say.

But you can’t blame overall server population. GoM has plenty of people willing to queue when you’re winning or stand a chance. You just seem to fall over dead at the first whiff of failure rather than staying in the fight and trying to pull victory from the jaws of defeat.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/The-real-problem-here-is-invisible-enemies-Give-their-algorithms-time-to-match-servers-properly

To be fair, in this week’s match GoM, TC, and SoS were pretty even the first couple of days. And then the hackers on GoM started flying around, stealing orbs.

TC and SoS wouldn’t stand for it, and they independently pummeled GoM relentlessly for it. Fair or not, those hackers taint GoM, and can turn a fun match into a situation where the other two servers start thinking, “You know what? Let’s go get them rather than skirmish with each other, and show them that we’re not going to put up with that sort of nonsense.” There was no formal truce between TC and SoS, nor was there any sort of temporary alliance. Everyone just decided GoM was the target, for obvious reasons.

Even with the hacked stolen orbs and the invulnerable lords, TC and SoS started pulling away from GoM. For whatever reason (and I sincerely hope it was a set of permabans) the hackers on GoM didn’t make a marked reappearance.

So TC and SoS fought it out, and TC pulled ahead and is now in a decisive lead. SoS put up a good fight during NA nighttime (they’re an Oceanic server), but TC also has a decent night crew now, and with GoM so demoralized after the first few days’ events, TC was largely unopposed coming into Tuesday and Wednesday.

…except by a server-hopping guild tagged RUN, which decided to go from TC to SoS in the middle of the match, leaving some members on TC to steal supplies from keeps, enter WvWvW and not play thereby preventing actual TC players from participating, and so on.

TC’s latest struggle is mostly against some underhanded tactics of a fickle guild that likes to server-hop. And still, they have such a commanding lead, the match may as well be over.

Sad, really, because I was looking forward to some WvWvW tonight. Guess I’ll clean the house instead.

To sum up: GoM didn’t lose this week’s match due to lack of population. They lost because they stirred some righteous anger in the members of TC and SoS due to the presence of a few unscrupulous cheaters on GoM, and then because GoM apparently just gave up and stopped queuing.

About 5 minutes after you create your toon.

You do realize that the experiment you describe is a developmental psych experiment, and was designed to demonstrate that (rather young) children below a certain age are incapable of delayed gratification, don’t you?

I.e., it’s an indicator of emotional maturity.

I’m not quite sure that’s the brush you want to be painting people with here.

That wall is there for a reason. Stats-wise, their character IS done. There’s no more gear progression. ArenaNet isn’t Mythic. Character growth comes from getting prettier, not stronger. Maxing out all crafting (and you can max out every crafting skill on one toon). Playing the market and getting richer. Becoming more proficient in tactics and strategy on the battlefield.

Honestly, until GW2 was launched, everyone kept insisting they played DAoC for 10 years because it was FUN, and “fun” was defined as “all the great RvR fights”, and how all the DAoC classes were so much fun to play in RvR, and how skill was the most important aspect of DAoC.

Now, suddenly, that’s all a lie, and people played DAoC for 10 years because of some artificial progression system.

Frankly, I don’t want to see any such system in place, for one simple reason: It rewards people who have more time to play.

Let’s take another very successful franchise as an example: The premier FPS (like it or not), CoD. For the past several years now, they’ve had achievements, unlocks, and ranks. PURELY COSMETIC achievements, unlocks, and ranks. Once you hit level cap, that’s it; you’re done. No more power, no more progression, unless you get bored, want to re-lock all your weapon unlocks, and start again for the strange desire to have a different graphic next to your name on the scoreboard.

Those, I’m fine with. If people want to forego food, personal hygiene, interpersonal relationships, and a career just to be level 80 rank 10 or whatever in a videogame, more power to them. I happen to think it’s a massive waste of time and effort, but it makes them happy, so they can have at it.

The DAoC system, on the other hand, was NON-COSMETIC progression. In short, it benefits those who have no life.

Know what’s not fun to a lot of people? Coming into a fight only to get smacked down not because of skill, but because someone hasn’t left their chair for three solid months.

I realize there are people that want that sort of system. I also realize that non-cosmetic progression past level cap is nothing more than a game of “I can spend more time playing than you can, and am better not because I’m a superior player, but because I have less of a life than you”. It’s a system that encourages people to do anything to get to than next step in the non-cosmetic, post-cap progression, including paying people to auto-progress for them, hacking, and so forth.

You didn’t see it that much in DAoC because it was, at best, a niche game and there was no real market for those who seek to illegally make real-world profit from doing such things. That’s not the case with GW2. In GW2, you will see those things, because that market exists.

DAoC was a game that had 1/8th of GW2’s playerbase at its peak. People played DAoC for 10 years because they disliked WAR, WoW, EQ, and Lineage, and needed a regular fix of RvR.

Let’s clarify one very important thing: I’m happy that a lot of the DAoC die-hards are giving GW2 a try. Really, I am.

But, could you please resist the urge some of you seem to have to try to turn GW2 WvWvW into DAoC? What next, calls for massive amounts of CC to be added to the game? We’ve already seen calls for just about every other adjustment to WvWvW to make it more like DAoC.

Give GW2 a chance the way ArenaNet envisions it. If, after a year or two, it’s still not to your liking, either give up or THEN start calling for changes.

But calling for changes to WvWvW after the game’s been out a month on the basis that you’re getting bored says far more about you than it does about GW2.

Quaggan plushies mailed to the house of every participant on the winning server every two weeks.

This isn’t meant as a flame, merely a question: Have the flying/speedhacking cheaters that GoM have unfortunately and unfairly become synonymous with been banned yet?

funforums.4850:

Actually I didn’t know of TCP offload, sincerely speaking. And now that I think about it, without such a technology MMOs wouldn’t be possible, lol.
Anyway can you link me some type of inefficiencies of this TOE? Maybe some are related to our situation, and anyway I’m actually pretty much curious about this right now.

There’s a paper published in the ACM about a decade ago by a guy from HP; he gave a talk on it at USENIX one year, and his slides are fairly easy to follow: http://static.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/talks/mogul_talk.pdf

If you google for the title of the talk, you’ll also find the original ACM paper. He points up both the good and bad with TCP offload. However, it’s a good idea to read his work with an eye to the fact that what you’re reading is a decade old, and advances have been made since then.

It’s an interesting area of study, but it’s a delicate balancing act that’s highly dependent upon the particular use cases for it — much like every other high-performance tuning situation. Sadly, the days of surly old neckbeards who understood the machines from the bare metal, up through the kernel, and into userspace in excruciating detail being the ones actually responsible for making server configuration choices are long gone…those people either retired, became academics, entrepreneurs, management, or much higher-level architects.

That, and the general complexity of most OS kernels and the traffic flows being handled these days have mostly eliminated the gurus of old. Everyone specializes now, and it’s rare that the person hired to do “highly-scalable datacenter clustering architecture” will give any thought at all to ANY particular settings on individual servers in the farm, and the front line ops guys tasked with staging and deployment either don’t have the experience and knowledge, or have it and don’t have the leverage to do anything with it when it comes to things like telling the senior datacenter architect that disabling TCP offload in the datacenter may significantly improve overall throughput for that particular use case. Because it’s almost impossible to model in a lab setting, so you can’t argue from the standpoint of a demonstration, and getting them to make the changes on a live cluster is often like pulling teeth in most organizations.

…which is one reason why I tend to stay with small- to mid-sized companies. When they get too big to listen to reason, the frustration level exceeds my ability to care about my paycheck, which is typically substantial.

I will say that, from what I’ve seen of TSG’s abilities in WvWvW on TC, they’re a guild worthy of respect.

Ljiona.9142:

The way I see it, they are moving to a server with less WvW population during their playing times than the one they were on. That should be commended because 99% of MMOers don’t do that. They rather flock to servers with 24 hour queues.

Pretty Girls wear PINK.

Actually, the reason I suspect is behind their move: RUN likes…no, RUN insists on being in charge when they’re in WvWvW, even if they don’t really have any strategy to speak of. They tend to get belligerent towards anyone who dares to disagree with them, suggest other, perhaps better approaches, or leads a major push without them or their blessing.

They’ve been on several servers so far, and have been unable to get their way, so they saw SoS, a server with an extremely small NA population, as their last, best chance to be big fish in a little pond. They get to go to SoS and throw their weight around, because there’s really nobody playing during the times they’re on to take issue with anything they say. When and if others join SoS, RUN will be the established NA daytime presence, and will be in a position to insist on obedience, something they seem to desperately want on the servers they’ve been on so far, but which nobody has been foolish enough to give them.

Fare well, RUN. Oh, and get the rest of your members out of TC’s WvWvW, since you’ve “left”. You’re just shining a blazing spotlight on your true colors with what you’re up to there.

Winterwolf.3782:

Apparently Defiance is camping GoM bl spawn, refusing to play, and therefore blocking actual TC players from defending our turf. Classy.

I thought they just claimed they left TC?

Union labor.

Everyone on our server got these adorable little plush Quaggans mailed to our homes. You mean you folks don’t get those?

Doesn’t guild influence get reset every time your guild server-hops? If so, RUN’s going to have a hard go at claiming any keeps in a meaningful manner if for some reason SoS so desperately needs a NA-daytime presence, as you state.

I’ll admit, SoS has some rather crafty folk in WvWvW, and they mount some great fights.

Also, now that you’ve stated your intentions halfway through a match against SoS, I’m not sure how inclined the folks on TC are going to be to trust RUN for the rest of the week, particularly given that SoS is in second place and you’ve just publicly declared a distinct lack of allegiance to TC.

@funforums (sorry, the quote function keeps mysteriously disappearing): that’s not true these days. almost any modern NIC uses TCP offload, and Windows has it enabled by default. Even if it weren’t, the amount of packet data being received per second by a single client wouldn’t be enough to create a noticeable increase in CPU load. Not only are there several research papers published on this in general as well as on the specific offload algorithms used and why they increase performance in this case, I deal with EXTREMELY high volume network performance testing and tuning on a daily basis as part of my job. Things that can saturate a GigE or 10GigE connection, as well as the switch backplane the load generators are connected to.

As for the server: It’s actually a cluster, and each machine in the cluster would also be using TCP offload (all major *nixes have it enabled these days as well). Which is probably one culprit here (or at least a tweak they’d want to look into), since using TCP offload when you’re dealing with a very high number of simultaneous connections and a high traffic volume is actually inefficient for a number of reasons.

Kazim.2043:

mcl.9240:

@Kazim: “some claims (sic) it’s a server side problem.”

Yes, some do. Including the developer that posted in this thread, explaining it was a server-side problem.

You’re welcome to disagree with him, but…er, he really is the authority on the matter.

If you check his post he’s talking about 3 different (but related) things

1. Report/information coming late from server
2. Loading/rendering time at client after report
3. A possible bug

I’m claiming the real problem is actually at client side as different graphics settings make a real difference on this “invisible enemy” problem.

As tested and reported by numerous people, different graphics settings make no meaningful difference on this invisible enemy problem. Across different speeds, core-counts, and manufacturers of CPUs, across different makes, models, and manufacturers of graphics cards, across different speeds, makes, models, and capacities of system RAM, and across different speeds, makes, models, configurations, and kinds of storage devices (both SSDs and hard drives).

You need to re-read his post. His explanation is simple: They changed the behavior server-side to reduce the overall bandwidth used per server, and to reduce client processing load (implying that they did it to improve perceived playability on older and/or weaker customer machines).

He then attempts to place some, very small, amount of blame on texture load-in from disk. Given the number of people, myself included, with homebuilt high-end system using the fastest available SSDs, GPUs with more than enough memory and pipelines to handle large textures, and a very fast CPU<→memory bus, that’s a red herring. It was a weak excuse when he wrote it, and I think he knows that. But he had to throw something out there.

Yes, it’s trivially true that it takes non-zero time to load textures from disk. That’s identical to saying water is wet. The delta from zero is what’s at issue there, and for those of us with extremely fast SSDs, we’re seeing the same problem people see with 10kRPM, 7200RPM, or even 5400RPM hard drives. Case in point: I’m able to do a side-by-side comparison with two toons in the same location, in the same BL map, at the same time, on two different computers of vastly different relative power in terms of CPU, GPU, and disk. EXACTLY the same problem is seen on both systems.

That puts the lie to the claim that texture load-in from disk is even partially implicated in this. On systems with fast SSDs as well as machines with slower platter-based drives, the load-in time is so negligible as to be a non-issue here.

@Kazim: “some claims (sic) it’s a server side problem.”

Yes, some do. Including the developer that posted in this thread, explaining it was a server-side problem.

You’re welcome to disagree with him, but…er, he really is the authority on the matter.

I was getting about one badge every 5 kills or so, but the last couple of days, I’ve barely gotten any. I had over 50 kills yesterday, and I got 1 badge. My playstyle hasn’t changed, and my kill rate per hour has actually gone up, but it seems like the badge drop rate (and, in fact, my loot bag drop rate) has gone down significantly.

Or, perhaps the bags themselves are now invisible, along with a good deal of the players, or spawning so late after a kill that I’m long gone before I get them, when they used to be fairly immediate.

Either way, I’m not too pleased about it.

CLearly, this was simply meant to be a “Look at me, I’m buying (or pretending to buy) a $3000 video card” post.

What the OP doesn’t realize is that the drivers are not meant to be used for games and will perform abysmally with gaming, nor is the card designed to handle gaming, and will perform worse than a $400-600 gaming card, which would have been a MUCH better purchase.

What confuses me is why the people being reported over and over again by countless people for at least a week if not more haven’t been banned yet for using these hacks.

Sharpclaw.7510:

Well, I don’t know about giving up. Bot SoS and TC are clearly the superior forces (although some Gates forces have done well and I’d be remiss to ignore them). Unless this hacker has a way to magically kill Lords and take positions from under people, this is still a fight that their server is going to have to push uphill in.

If it’s the hack people have seen in the past, the person or people can fly, they’re invulnerable, they have every buff it’s possible to have, they have ridiculous speed, and they can kill anyone they want at will, player or NPC.

So yes, they have the ability to more or less magically kill Lords. Game over.

Someone from ArenaNet needs to log into GoM and stay in WvWvW until they have the evidence they need to permaban however many people from GoM are doing this.

And they need to fix the broken altars, remove the hacked buffs, and reset the orbs.

That, or everyone from GoM, TC, and SoS need to just agree to stay out of WvWvW this week. If they want to hack, let them have an empty WvWvW game. They can fly all over 5 empty maps all they want.