Blatant Match Manipulation

I am currently in a match with a server who is intentionally claiming almost no objectives to prevent their ascent into T1. Their Kill/death ratio is almost 4x the opposing servers, however.

This sort of match manipulation should not be allowed under our current metric system. I propose that Anet take the Kill/Death ratio into significant account when determining future matches, otherwise even with the 'vaulted' alliance system that will likely come out with the expansion, servers that mainly consist of organized guilds will be able to prevent ascension into the tier they belong in by simply avoiding objectives.

Tanking ppt is on the same spectrum as flipping all 4 maps at 3am when the enemy is sleeping.

Either way, dailies, rewards and score should all have more contribution from ppk rather than focus mostly on ppt.

@steki.1478 said:Tanking ppt is on the same spectrum as flipping all 4 maps at 3am when the enemy is sleeping.

Should all the people who don't live in NA, move to NA to play, then? Or would you just prefer they stop sleeping while it's dark outside?

So... you would like them to change something that has been happening for almost 8 years?

Make WvW Great Again

Chuckles...I have to agree...it's more fun dominating people than it is flipping their empty objectives for PPT.

If they have the resolve to refrain from claiming objectives as they starve their PPT to avoid getting stuck with the 800 pound bG orilla in Tier 1.

This unnamed server community truly deserves it...imho

They're using the game mechanics to win their way. I blame our flawed Match-Up mechanics...?

Dude Tier 1 is full of map queues and blobfests. Its not fun mainly because once you get to T1 you can't play. My server is intentionally watching its PPT as to not make it so we don't have fun for a week or 2.

You can fight your way down as well as up in this game. Thank god. T1 sucks. Sounds to me like they earned their prize.

If they want to drop by doing this let them. They could also stop playing alltogether to drop. After all T1 usually isnt that much fun.

@"Diku.2546" said:They're using the game mechanics to win their way. I blame our flawed Match-Up mechanics...?

This. Bad enough that winning in WvW means nothing, but to have to worry about winning because if you move up a tier, you might then have to face off against the Voldemort server (and there is more than one, depending on who you ask) is just ridiculous.

When you see remarks on /t cautioning players against flipping objectives / PPT because that will mean we face off against "them" next week, it suggests the current system makes no sense.

I also remember a time when my server was moving up one week, then moving down the next, only to repeat the cycle, which meant every other week we'd have to face off against "them".

Drop the one up / one down, and just do random server matchups each week.

With servers strategizing about tanking / pushing other servers and bandwagon guilds, let's not pretend that we have now is anywhere close to balanced or organized. At least with random matchups you will have a chance to fight guilds you don't see often or before. And for anyone who is worried, if your server is perma T4, then facing off against a T1 server won't be any different or more painful than one from T2.

But at least people can just play the game without worrying about what winning or losing might lead to for the following week, and we can all enjoy the surprise of the new matchup after reset.

@"Apokriphos.7042" said:I am currently in a match with a server who is intentionally claiming almost no objectives to prevent their ascent into T1. Their Kill/death ratio is almost 4x the opposing servers, however.

This sort of match manipulation should not be allowed [...]

Not everyone plays for the same reasons; PPT, PPT & fights, fights: 1vs1, 1vs many, many vs. 1, small scale of up to 5, small team 10-20 vs. same size or larger, 50 vs. 50, any of these, afk PiP farming, "I just want my legendary" or some WvW exclusive item and then will be back to PvE, I'm just trolling the chat, wasting supply, activating emergency waypoint, I don't know how I got here please tell me how to exit WvW, and so on.

There are players who no longer care of PPT. I don't know if they are the majority or not, but I'm one of those. If an objective capture or defending doesn't involve difficult fights, then it's not fun. The only reason to log in is to say hi to friends, check if there's something to fight, and log out. The rest has no meaning: the WvW worlds no longer exist, they ended with mega servers and the re-link system, and thus the competition for first place lost it's meaning. Could be fixed? Sure, but the CEO or above level support wasn't there for years now, maybe they couldn't see a way to make it profitable, so it's up to another game to try to make profit from RvR players.

The only "reward" left in WvW are "good" fights; those which are either balanced or almost impossible to win. Easy fights are boring.Still, there are servers where most players want to end first spot in PPT score, and that's the reason they play. Just move to such PPT focused server and be a champion of the PPT, if you can enjoy that kind of play. No need to feel guilty, it's a valid gameplay, like the others listed above. Sorry, I just had enough of pointless PPT. Now if there was a reason, there was a coverage balance, un-fun parts were fixed, I would gladly cap things, because fights are even more fun when they have a reason.

And good luck fixing that "match manipulation", when the only "reward" left is getting into a "better matchup". Spoiler: that matchup will likely be just as bad, but when hope completely dies, there won't be any reason to log in.

As always, this is the inherent problems with the scoring system being broken.

Had the scoring system been working as it should, taking only fairly populated situations into account, the higher tiers would be populated with stronger servers, there would be less of a divide between PPT and PPK (because it is very difficult to just engage in one or the other when map populations are even), and being #1 would be something to compete for. The king of stacks would be #1 but the spots #2-5 would likely be composed only of servers with primetime presence / fighting ability making Tier 1 and Tier 2 the most coveted places for content as well as the places that compete for the Tier 1 end goal.

Alliances is the fix to getting players into the game, getting players a chance to get organized into player groups, etc. That gives a chance to create content.

That will give players the chance to create reliable #2, #3 and #4 groups etc. It isn't so much the Alliances/Battlegroups themselves that will do this but rather the simple checks put into place letting players be transfered with their guild and putting caps on full servers depending on affiliation. If those mechanics alone could be shipped early, before the entire system is written, it could make a major positive impact even within the existing server system. It's not the servers as an entity that are a problem but rather that groups can not recruit and build community due to unaffiliated swarming filling servers up. This is what checks and shapes the players' behaviour.

The scoring system is what will determine the "spirit" and behaviour of the player groups. That will shape the peak content towards the top of the ladder.

Servers that has content only really drop or climb to get away from servers that can not provide them with matching content whether that is in T3 or T1.

Those servers that they want to get away from only end up there because the system is broken. In fact, those servers too would have more fun in the right tier for them. If that tier is T4 or T5 doesn't really matter because it is more important to find matchups that actually match up to what you are and have. That is how you can create content to have fun by being relatively equally matched.

• National PPT servers with 0.5 k/d and half a primetime presence in T1 is an example of the scoring system being broken.
• Super-stacked fight-servers with a 2.0 k/d fighting other best-matched servers in T2 or T3 is also an example of the scoring system being broken.
• Super-stacked fight-servers matched against some depopulated midtier server or some server rebuilding player groups in T3 is due to broken scoring.
• The system is eating itself, rendering less fun and content than the potential, and hurts rebuilding communities, beyond losing its end goal and drive.

@"Apokriphos.7042" said:(...) servers that mainly consist of organized guilds will be able to prevent ascension (...)If a server "mainly consists of organized guilds" but those guilds are not able to carry the server to the next tier, they dont belong there. that's the core principle for any kind of team based ranked/tier matchmaking...you see bronze players in PvP complaining all the time how they are definitely playing on diamond level but their teams are holding them back. well guess what: if you're not able to carry your team to win, your rank is exactly what it's supposed to be.

Just as a time-capsule, let me add this:

There are a bunch of threads about WSR in the EU region right now. They got no link. That is how the system works. It is working as intended. They have been stacked for a long time, which is what ultimately made them lose their link. Their former links were also likely populated with affiliated players who sat on the link as an extension of the host. At the same time, that means that they are stacked with quite alot of players who are there to consume the content of the group(s) that produce that content. Without the link they are going to struggle with productive numbers, forcing the content-producers on that server to work even harder to create content which they can not / will not do. There were likely even players in guilds split over host/link servers that now have no option to play with their friends.

So you will soon see a guild like KILL move (if they haven't already, there are whispers about FR or whatever). With them you are going to see the "greater KILL community" of players with mutual benefit move (ie., a sort of "Alliance" of affiliated players not in the guild, affilitated players in other guilds, GvG guilds like Lays). Slowly but surely whatever new server they land on will start getting swarmed and climb to be a host server but linked.

In this process you are going to see affiliated players drop off because they have a hard time motivating paying for transfers. You are going to see unaffiliated players stack their new server over time and many of those will be tourists from other modes who have superior means to finance the transfers. So the larger community of affiliated players will lose players. The mode/game will lose potentially active and productive WvW players. The server/mode will not necessarily lose less productive players beyond the first few weeks as unaffiliated players take their time to figure this out. This perpetually drains content.

So as far as WSR as an entity goes, good riddance or whatever, I don't particularily care either way, but the underlying processes at work here is ruining the mode and the developer has yet to understand the fundamental problems with it, their severity and the urgency of all of this.

If scoring and even just the basic isolated components of the Alliance system's transfer rules were addressed a community like that could sit happily in T1 where they belong, have fresh faces comming up to challenge and unseat them from T2 (involving 5 additional servers in the carousel) and their guilds could still recruit players, replace vacancies and get their players to the server so the guilds wouldn't be forced to move and take all the content with them just to reset the bloat. It all ties in together: Alliances, scoring, match "manipulation", stacking and whatever next "server X got no-linked" topic to appear.

Why can't everyone just play the way I want to play, except I don't play anymore, but you get what I mean.

@steki.1478 said:Tanking ppt is on the same spectrum as flipping all 4 maps at 3am when the enemy is sleeping.

Either way, dailies, rewards and score should all have more contribution from ppk rather than focus mostly on ppt.

I would go the other way, PPK should have more personal gain but less server gain. Personal gain from zerging should be reduced at the same time to offset stacking and after hours capping and reduce K-Training. And then end of week should award all but greater for higher placement and higher tier. People should want to get to the top of T1 since it should mean they are facing more fights and challenge but it will pay more. Blobbing should be discouraged by increasing PPT since people would need to spread more to hold onto more if they want to win. Sides with higher KD's also tend to blob more, by rewarding blobbing less you get more fights since people that aren't blobbing will attack more even numbers versus just getting jumped by the blob.

@Turkeyspit.3965 said:

@Diku.2546 said:They're using the game mechanics

to win their way

. I blame our flawed Match-Up mechanics...?

At least players (collectively) are using the match-up mechanics to earn the spoils (joy / happiness / reason for playing) they feel are important to them.

Poor match-up design is the primary source to our current state of WvW...imho

@"subversiontwo.7501" said:As always, this is the inherent problems with the scoring system being broken.

I would have to say that our match-up system is the inherent part that is broken.

The fix for a broken match-up system is simple...imho

Make Match-ups Anet [ controlled ]:Assign each server a single map.Allow Players to pick [1-2] enemy servers to fight against per week.Allow Players to wait in queue when a maximum map capacity of [100-500] is reached.

Make the Match-ups Player driven:Allow Players to pick any enemy server to fight against.Allow Players to defend their home server.Reward Players only when they attack other servers that are ranked higher than their home server.

Make Servers earn the right to be Rank #1 in WvW:Provides meaning behind the War between servers.

Simple & straight forward in design is the best fix...imho

Full context to fixing our broken match-up system can be found here.

Yup, people aren't interested in playing the gamemode itself anymore. Just the combat system. Scouts and truly open commanders, ones that don't stack on server with 3+ guilds raiding together, are extinct

Its basically habits, community and nostalgia keeping them coming to log in as from my knowledge there aren't fastpace largescale games with better combat system where they can fit in with their friends.

Combat system is fiiiiiiine and serves the purpose for fights. The balance behind objectives, scoring, population, transferring and sieging isn't which damages any group that wants to play real WvW that works around objectives AND fights (I would estimate that less than 0.1% of population would enjoy capping empty objectives over and over)

@Diku.2546 said:At least players (collectively) are using the match-up mechanics to earn the spoils (joy / happiness / reason for playing) they feel are important to them.

Don't know if I would agree with that statement, given I know many players who, because of what I said before about not driving up the warscore, choose simply to not log in for a few days, rather than risk rising into a tier that contains a server that players don't want to fight.

Reminds me of the olden days of WoW where you had to be careful to not outlevel the zone you were in, if you wanted to finish the story line without all the NPCs turning 'grey' and awarding no XP. Plain old dysfunctional design.

Thank you all for the feedback and perspective.

Some here keep mentioning said 'match manipulating' servers are just seeking 'fun' fights. However, there is an issue with this statement.

These manipulators have a 4-5x kill/death ratio over their competitors. That means they typically are running organized squads/5 man comps in discord and many times camping the spawns of daily hunters. Thats how they get such kill rates. A 'fun fight' is when you/your team wins and farms bags. Said groups don't stick around when the opposing server brings an organized group to challenge them. They run seeking greener pastures with more newbies to farm.

Who is that fun for? The daily hunters? And many here are saying that its fine for them to exploit the scoring system to stay in t2.

The poor organized groups and guilds - with enough power to prevent the uninitiated in their server from taking towers to keep them free to farm daily hunters in t2 and below. And even using alt accounts to decap when necessary.

This is where our matchmaking system really fails. The solution is simple too. It doesnt require a thesis.

What Anet should do is make kill/death a much larger proportion of the score determining which server moves up. Sure, it might affect the impact of server movement by night decappers. But I dont really think anyone here would be upset about that.

@"Apokriphos.7042" said:These manipulators have a 4-5x kill/death ratio over their competitors.

What this actually means in practice is "having a kdr around 2.0 while the enemy team's at 0.5." Because those two things are inherently linked together. Poking at wvwstats, you can see a lot of matchups like that settle closer to the "strongest" server running 1.6-1.8 kdr. I've seen numbers like that more than once on reset night, in tiers where all three servers field 4 full map queues.

@"Apokriphos.7042" said:That means they typically are running organized squads/5 man comps in discord and many times camping the spawns of daily hunters.

Are they spawn-camping you across multiple maps or are they "claiming almost no objectives?"

@"ASP.8093" said:Are they spawn-camping you across multiple maps or are they "claiming almost no objectives?"

Said 'match manipulation' server is doing both of these things. The goal of said players is to achieve maximum bags with minimal difficulty.

This is something matchmaking should be working to resolve.

@Apokriphos.7042 said:Thank you all for the feedback and perspective.

Some here keep mentioning said 'match manipulating' servers are just seeking 'fun' fights. However, there is an issue with this statement.

These manipulators have a 4-5x kill/death ratio over their competitors. That means they typically are running organized squads/5 man comps in discord and many times camping the spawns of daily hunters. Thats how they get such kill rates. A 'fun fight' is when you/your team wins and farms bags. Said groups don't stick around when the opposing server brings an organized group to challenge them. They run seeking greener pastures with more newbies to farm.

Well if I could give you a timeline, it is that HoT was introduced with claim buff+dragon banners+tanky lords and soon people realised to take things you need to be much stronger than enemy and started stacking their blob servers. Now as time went by, the veterans on core OG servers with big PvE pop also realised this and went along with it, as just waiting for enemy to come to you is boring. Now you end up with servers that have only 3k+ rank players while enemies are majority new players below 1k. However fighting people below 1k rank isn't exactly exciting because they just get 1-shot with little bit of agression. So these fight servers are just passing time until they face each other. Now to give context, there are 5 stacked blobguildservers on EU, so there is still a high chance they will get some fights daily.

So as experienced wvw player you have 3 options:

• Never challenge yourself by being on weak server because taking anything hard is impossible with low ranks alongside you agaisnt high ranks. Basically give up being nr 1 or having high skilled fights
• Join a guild and ignore pugtagsor
• Stack with other veterans

Ultimately the need for stacking started with things being easy to defend and upgrade, for example soon after alpine bls was returned after HoT, there were multiple matchups were every single side/north keep and towers were T3 on their relative home borderlands. That ment that defender won everytime someone attemped to take them. So playerbase adapted by making their group stronger by stacking on servers, still better than taking a fight you will lose 100% or twiddling you thumbs at spawn.

Now funnily as pug groups stopped hitting upgraded objectives, scouting died as well because who builds a siege and keeps eye for that 1 time a day guildblob rolls through ignoring defensive siege with shield gens taking the thing. Sniping upgraded objectives fot PPT still exists but as objectives, due to lower upgrade times and no upgrade cost, and tick matter less with new scoring system, even it has been reduced (sniping objectives was mostly adapting to being outnumbered anyways)

But yea, its just playerbase adapting so they can play alongside equally skilled players while being able to take things and have fights. There are no coordinated fights being in a pugserver where you can play firebrand and hit maybe 3 of your party members if you're lucky.

@"Apokriphos.7042" said:A 'fun fight' is when you/your team wins and farms bags. Said groups don't stick around when the opposing server brings an organized group to challenge them. They run seeking greener pastures with more newbies to farm.

Who is that fun for? The daily hunters? And many here are saying that its fine for them to exploit the scoring system to stay in t2.This is just you freely interpreting what was said just to fit it into your sob story while seemingly not understanding what was said at all.

Let me help you with a very quick example:

If T1 does not get server #2 and server #3 or if T2 correspondingly does not have server #4 to rotate into T1 and instead we see server #7 and #9 matched up vs. #1 in T1 because they nightcapped their way there, then #1 will seek to find server #2 and #3 down in T2.

That is the "fun" I referred to (and I believe I was the only one who used the term). They are not there to farm easy bags on server #8 and #10 because that is where #2 and #3 are sitting. Are you with me now?

Ontop of that you can consider that as long as creating stacks involves paid transfers alone you will have quite few servers that are stacked in the host/link=1 recycling combination. That makes the difference between lets say #1 and #2 relative #3 and #4 larger than it needs to be or would be should everyone get easier recruitment because that is likely to benefit #3 and #4 more than #1 or #2 who already have more or less fully nomadic communities that doubles up the host.

All in all the issue is much less that #1 may dip to T2 to find #2-4 and much more of an issue that #2-4 is not in T1-2 or that #2-7 are not in T1-3. That is why this is much more of a scoring issue than "the evil #1-3 servers dipping down to farm the poor nabs" complaint of this thread.

You are correct about one thing @"subversiontwo.7501"

This is a scoring issue.

As I said in my initial post, if Anet does not address this issue now, when Alliances finally arrives it will even be more rampant there, where all powerful voices in a alliance server belong to guilds.

My "sob story" is an accurate representation of exactly whats available for public viewing at wvwstats.com. A server with extremely high %ppt matched up vs one with extremely high kills/death ratio. The imbalance is just far more noticeable in my scenario, leading to vastly skewed matchmaking.

The solution is to increase the impact of kills/death on scoring.