Jump to content
  • Sign Up

Would Five Sides be Better Than Three?


Svarty.8019

Recommended Posts

I mean, it could be four, but Three seems bad because;

  1. With one side, everybody is on the same side so world peace/totalitarianism - Utopia/Dystopia.
  2. With two sides, you get one side dominating and the other too weak to compete most of the time, as evidenced back in WARhammer.
  3. With three sides, you get one side particularly weak in comparison to the other two sides, and the other two piling onto the weak side, forcing a similar situation to if there were two sides.
  4. With more than three sides, it could be the case that the same would happen but at least there's a chance for more variety.

What do you think?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

friendly reminder that the servers sometimes cannot even sustain two blobs. threeways nearly always lag. stealth in twoways produces yet pingperks as if each picture of the screen had to be painted by hand first.

now you want fiveways? fun idea, surely, just not at all gonna ever work.

besides, Anet seems to not want make changes at all. why would they create a whole now format out of this, if they don't even give any new content outside of a Nerferama9000 quickwash-programme to Wvw?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@kamikharzeeh.8016 said:friendly reminder that the servers sometimes cannot even sustain two blobs. threeways nearly always lag. stealth in twoways produces yet pingperks as if each picture of the screen had to be painted by hand first.

I didn't say anything about performance, so we can IMAGINE using our IMAGINATIONs... is it really this difficult to consider without all the practical implications?

Let's pretend Anet are making Guild Wars 3, and we might want a WvW mode that's BETTER than the one we have now (putting aside the fact that we all think they hate WvW and everything about it and wish it wasn't a thing) ... would the new WvW mode be better with more sides?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"Svarty.8019" said:

  1. With three sides, you get one side particularly weak in comparison to the other two sides, and the other two piling onto the weak side, forcing a similar situation to if there were two sides.My experience of this mode is completely different. It is far more common to see one side being significantly weaker and running around in the background (doing caps, ganks and occassionally fighting) while the two dominant servers fight and compete.

Aside from that, yes, I think that a 5-side WvW could easily be as interesting as a 3-side WvW. It would require more careful attention to a bunch of things in the mode though (getting balance into map design for example, more sides inherently raises the complexity of things like that and there are quite alot of them when you start looking at it). At the same time, it's not like ArenaNet are doing these things for this mode anyway, so it feels rather pointless to point to hypothetical advantages of a 3-side mode when they are not taken advantage of as is.

WvW as we know it could easily have been 5-sided from the get go and things would not be worse now than how things are.

Edit. Good topic btw. Interesting :3

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Svarty.8019 said:

@kamikharzeeh.8016 said:friendly reminder that the servers sometimes cannot even sustain two blobs. threeways nearly always lag. stealth in twoways produces yet pingperks as if each picture of the screen had to be painted by hand first.

I didn't say anything about performance, so we can IMAGINE using our IMAGINATIONs... is it really this difficult to consider without all the practical implications?

we might want a WvW mode that's BETTER than the one we have now

no, it isn't hard to imagine at all, but it would work currently not at least. maps would be a bit full tho. unless you'd force it to be smaller scale only, which i'm not sure i'd like.besides, there's such a crazy ton of things to fix before inventing a new format kinda...

it would be even includeable in gw2. change EotM up a bit, rearrange stuff and add 2 more entries, add some terrain. (it need a workover anyways to make it not useless anymore) - since it had always extra rules, they could still simply link it to the score system, that cannot be that hard. then put a 2nd set of tiers into them and you'd kinda have this done.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well to start with another bummer first, it would require all new maps, none of the current ones would work with 5 teams no matter how much they hacked at them. And if we ignore the lag and issues around the servers etc.

But on the pure design space of 5 player vs 3 player. I'd say it would work about as well, it doesn't change the actual design of the mode all that much, just more opportunistic and even harder to actually defend/hold something as it's potential 4 vs 1 odds if they decide to take something rather than just 2 vs 1.

It would require reducing the map caps by quite a lot, if we currently got approx 80 per side for 240 total, say 250/5= 50 per side, but with more sides in general I suspect the servers going to lag more, so might have to reduce that to 40 (200 total).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think with 5 you might end up with even more population imbalance. That's given the assumption that people already server hop to more populated servers, there would be fill the top on then the next so by the time you got to 4 and 5 they might end up vastly under populated. I will admit interesting idea though but I also think that if 3 sides meeting for a fight required x amount of calculations based on who is where then adding more would further impact the number of those calculations.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The only real advantage is that it that it would involve less focusing of the weakest server, which can be somewhat demoralizing.

In the current system, it's easiest to get 2nd place by simply backcapping/karma training the weakest party's items. In a 5 side conflict, the same is going to happen, but there will be naturally more time to recover.

However, one problem might be the lack of matchup variety. Even in a hypothetical Guild Wars 3 which would have WvW (honestly, this is also highly unlikely), you would need a lot more servers, and a lot more people to make this work.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The basic idea behind three servers fighting each other is that when two weaker (less active/populated) can take down the stronger one, but with linking servers that did change to more mixed picture. With five servers fighting each other it will be harder to coordinate two or more to fight the stronger server and also more messy for what is going on.

I don't think more server fighting each other will improve game mode in WvW. It will add more calculation on servers as for where people are and who they are fighting. Right now game only need to keep track of three ID (colour) for who friend and who is enemy. Add to that how range work for boons and other attributes in WvW. (Don't recall if there is any condition that is depending/shared on range outside of AoE where one target need to be get hit first or max 5 player). The total population will also need to limited to avoid that maps feel too small and have too many on the same spot (which create issues with server lag).

From this thread down here, it looks like I am right to assume that more servers or how ever one want to define player vs player combat in WvW mode will increase problems with max population for each side fighting.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/109755/wvw-performance-and-map-cap-testing

It is not realistic to have more servers/teams or what ever that can fight each (PvP) other as there is limitation from how game engine work (including from hardware side and network between client and server).

Game engine isn't just what is on the server side (the usual way of using the term "game engine") it is also how the client have been designed to provide as a real time experience among multiple player/clients that operate in the same instance (or WvW map). This means that every client need to synchronise actions so when one client are doing something that the other client (that is connected to same server pool through Internet - often at a physical distance on a network with a complex network of nodes in between [*]) will have the same action happen. In WvW it is more acute that this happens as coordinated as possible to not create conflicting information in server (disregard player action).

There are different protocol or "language" for communication and Internet is build around TCP/IP which means that it have some extra information in each package to prevent abuse/security issues. It is more complex then this, but that should also be taken into account that there is simpler and more direct protocol that is "safe" to use on local network as you don't expect the local link have someone abuse it and therefore have less of security build into it.

I am not a network designer, but that is how far I understand it from all years of dealing with network and computers. That is something every MMO have to deal with as they need to keep within the constrains of how TCP/IP work over Internet and how Internet have been designed to keep security at a basic level for normal communication. As Amazon have the servers and also part of the nodes (points that connects on Internet to dedicated server for ANet/Amazon to ISP and to the clients network), it is hard to know how capable this system will be to handle more server sides that can fight each other.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ive always thought structuring wvw based on guilds would be interesting. You would only be allied with your guild members, and if you arent in a guild then everyone is hostile. Obviously this wouldnt work with current maps, and the target cap would probably have to be removed to discourage blob bandwagoning. I do think it could potentially be more fun than the traditional 2-3 side system.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 Way Battles could be fun if ANet got rid of servers, introduced five different factions, and these factions maintained a constant battle that reset weekly without shuffling combatants. At that point though they should honestly just redo WvW. The problem with 5 Teams is that eventually there just wont be enough population to go around. I remember back in Guild Wars 1 there used to be 5 way team battles in the Hall of Heroes and a few of the maps leading up to it. But it only really ever reach 5 when the game was brand new. Eventually ANet just removed the Teal and Purple teams all together. I'd imagine they learned from that and wanted to keep it as a three way battle.

Let's just scrap WvW and make a new form of open world PvP.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Svarty.8019 said:I mean, it could be four, but Three seems bad because;

  1. With one side, everybody is on the same side so world peace/totalitarianism - Utopia/Dystopia.
  2. With two sides, you get one side dominating and the other too weak to compete most of the time, as evidenced back in WARhammer.
  3. With three sides, you get one side particularly weak in comparison to the other two sides, and the other two piling onto the weak side, forcing a similar situation to if there were two sides.
  4. With more than three sides, it could be the case that the same would happen but at least there's a chance for more variety.

What do you think?

Think of the glorious lag! 1 FPS!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...