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World Restructuring Update 2


Raymond Lukes.6305

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@Kolisch.4691 said:WvW is ANET's best gem grab to date. The rampant bandwagoning means that a majority of those who don't spend gems will login to wvw having forced to face hundreds of players with just a couple of guys chased around the whole map just to take a camp for the whole week.

For now gw2 is not a game I can recommend to families and friends to purchase for its wvw game mode. It's kind of degrading to play something like this. It's still a great game for the pve content.

It's a playermade problem really. The bandwagoning makes it impossible to enjoy the game on both sides, while the servers they transfer from will suffer even more on the long term, causing more people to transfer and be miserable.

/shrug

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@Sviel.7493 said:Updates on this are always nice, but I'd still be much more excited to see an update/clarity on what Anet wants WvW to be.

Honestly, I don’t really care what they want it to be. I prefer they do what they can to allow us to make it what we want...

There are numbers balance issues, there are OP mechanics, but as a whole, let it be what we want it to be. Which is different for most of us.

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I just hope it does give us some different reward structure alongside it. Whether that is something similar to seasons or not I don't care, but taking a break from it and seeing many people quit or change servers the last couple of weeks really showed me that winning should mean something. Restructuring alone will fix many of the issues people try to escape from, but long term there needs to be some form of reward for actually working your kitten off.

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@Blocki.4931 said:I just hope it does give us some different reward structure alongside it. Whether that is something similar to seasons or not I don't care, but taking a break from it and seeing many people quit or change servers the last couple of weeks really showed me that winning should mean something. Restructuring alone will fix many of the issues people try to escape from, but long term there needs to be some form of reward for actually working your kitten off.

i am not a WVW heavy player, but i think one of the issues is it feels rather pointless. A reward system might help, but probably not, as WvW primarily rewards time spent, and that generally will only appeal to people who can spend tons of time. for example, the skirmish track awards spending more hours per week in wvw, but its a pretty poor motivator for people who only are going to play an hour or so a day.

to be honest the biggest motivator for me in GW wvw, was the old trashtalk heavy forums and the early tournaments. There needs to be a motivation for going to war. If its rewards just based on winning, that will mostly just lead to stacking. I think it would need to be about team pride/props revenge/domination/ competition. But honestly wvw probably requires too many resources and changes to get better, and there is no guarantee these iterations will lead to a better product, so its basically a tough cookie to crack.

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@Nebilim.5127 said:What about the roleplaying servers? Will anything be done about keeping the already shambled community together now that there won't be any official RP server?

Well in the open world is the mega server system and this will only affect wvw since you can play in the open world with players from nearly every world, so as long you don´t RP in wvw it should still be the same and tbh. wvw is like pvp a competitive mode so there should be no rp (my opinion).

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@Dawdler.8521 said:

@"Chasind.3128" said:Just merge EU with NA- so we will always have the numbers. Many of us are looking for fights, not tower camping.And we would also always have unplayable lag. Is that better?

Create a map where roaming is more rewarding, Jade quarry was really popular in GW1 maybe make a map where you go in with a team to keep control over a given area to earn more bonus pips in WvW kinda like Spvp, they have done things like that before :) "Heros Ascent in GW1 with UW/FoW"

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@Dawdler.8521 said:

@Chasind.3128 said:Just merge EU with NA- so we will always have the numbers. Many of us are looking for fights, not tower camping.And we would also always have unplayable lag. Is that better?

There are better ways to liven up maps, mine was just a suggestion, never said it was a good one. Maybe WvW servers shouldnt be on amazon servers

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@sinsrock.1702 said:

@"Chasind.3128" said:Just merge EU with NA- so we will always have the numbers. Many of us are looking for fights, not tower camping.And we would also always have unplayable lag. Is that better?

Create a map where roaming is more rewarding, Jade quarry was really popular in GW1 maybe make a map where you go in with a team to keep control over a given area to earn more bonus pips in WvW kinda like Spvp, they have done things like that before :) "Heros Ascent in GW1 with UW/FoW"

I'd rather actually play WvW, sorry.
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  • 2 weeks later...

@Strider Pj.2193 said:

@Sviel.7493 said:Updates on this are always nice, but I'd still be much more excited to see an update/clarity on what Anet wants WvW to be.

Honestly, I don’t really care what they want it to be. I prefer they do what they can to allow us to make it what we want...

There are numbers balance issues, there are OP mechanics, but as a whole, let it be what we want it to be. Which is different for most of us.

Therein lies the problem.

As a fairly sandbox mode, there's plenty of room for it to be whatever we want it to be. However, there are mechanics in place that don't change based on our individual preferences. If Anet made Golem Week permanent and then let the players decide how they wanted to play, it would be very different from if they made No-Downed week permanent instead. Their decisions on what they want to happen determine the bounds of the sandbox. When things like Shield Generators show up and at first appear to be a defensive boon but instead work out to make offense invincible, it'd be nice to know what the intent was. That helps me determine if it's a sandbox I want to play in or one I'd rather avoid.

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So after being involved in a bandwagon, alliances has me a little concerned.

Will hours played be divided somewhat evenly across the new makeup or will those who play more heavily be grouped together? If the latter won't it result in the horrible situation sor became briefly? Huge queues for na then little else otherwise?

The way I read it a 'server' will be a couple alliances of 500 and then enough smaller groups and singles to even the population out. WHEN the hours played won't matter, just how many there are.

So unless an alliance deliberately portions out timezones itself(which is harder to do than I previously thought) you could end up with players playtimes being all the same.

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@Etria.3642 said:So after being involved in a bandwagon, alliances has me a little concerned.

Will hours played be divided somewhat evenly across the new makeup or will those who play more heavily be grouped together? If the latter won't it result in the horrible situation sor became briefly? Huge queues for na then little else otherwise?

The way I read it a 'server' will be a couple alliances of 500 and then enough smaller groups and singles to even the population out. WHEN the hours played won't matter, just how many there are.

So unless an alliance deliberately portions out timezones itself(which is harder to do than I previously thought) you could end up with players playtimes being all the same.

You can see the potential flaws in the system. That being said, it does provide smaller chunks for Anet to portion out into worlds.

As I’ve said before, my worry is an alliance made up of just SEA and OCX guilds. That would make them very instrumental in determining wins based in coverage. As there are comparably few players in those time zones, they would likely be paired with a NA heavy alliance.

If the rewards stay the same, and don’t get buffed significantly (which would incentivize the behavior potentially) we should be fine as ‘winning’ won’t mean anything other than bragging rights. (And meme creation of course).

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  • 2 weeks later...

@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:Hey everyone,I would like to give you all a quick update about world restructuring. It has been a few months since our last update, and we are happy to let you know that progress has been good. We have overcome a few major snags and bugs and this has put a few of our big goals in sight.

What am I working on?

I am primarily working on World Restructuring with some of my time supporting the live game. These additional tasks include improvements for some live systems, addressing bugs and a bit of internal support for the team. I have worked on some QoL tasks such as removing participation decay outside of WvW. I hope that we soon will be able to announce some of the other things we have been working on. As I have discussed before, we are working on a live game, and so there are always a lot of moving parts.

What has been happening with World Restructuring?

We spent some time since the July update working on breaking down the remaining backend tasks. I have been focusing on getting those things done. Presently, many of the pieces are working on their own, though some things are still outstanding. Once I have all the parts I will begin the work of stitching it all together. I want to stress that while there has been a lot of work done, and we have made some really good and exciting progress, we are still a ways out from the launch of World Restructuring and Alliances.

One of the elements that currently is functional on the backend is the concept of WvW guilds and players being able to select a WvW guild. We test this using debug commands because none of the UI is in place, but the communication layers are there as well as the storage aspects of that data. This provides us with some of the data necessary for grouping people onto teams in the matchmaker.

Speaking of the matchmaker, I have completed a very basic implementation of a matchmaker that will churn through a huge list of players grouped by WvW guild and then place them on teams while keeping team sizes even. There is still a lot to do with this to get it to something that handles all the cases we want, but the early work and numbers look very promising.

We are taking a pragmatic approach to building and testing various parts of World Restructuring. We are already testing some of these systems in isolation using live data and the live environment. Using this method, we have already identified bugs and race conditions that would have been difficult to track down and fix with the whole system in place.

There has not been a ton of work on the player front end. We continue to focus on getting the core architecture solid so we can build the frontend on a working foundation. Once work is underway and we have something more tangible on the frontend, we can start discussing how we want to show off the new shinies to everyone.

F.A.Q.

What World Restructuring update would be complete without an FAQ section?

Is there an update on the Alliance (World Restructuring) system?Yes, here it is! ;)

Can NA and EU players join the same Alliance and play WvW together?No. The NA and EU still will be split and have their own teams. While it technically will be possible for a guild or alliance to have members in both NA and EU, the system places those players on teams in their own datacenter.

Will I need to buy an Expansion to get into an alliance?No.

What about non-WvW groups that use their shard to influence map instance selection outside of WvW?These players will be unaffected by this change. The system that chooses map instances does not consider shard.

How does the alliance system fix anything if people still will be able to transfer?Currently, the plan is to change where we allow people to transfer, and to be more responsive to transfer restrictions for teams that are overpopulated. Some of the details of how this will work are in the original post about World Restructuring.

Will time zone imbalance still be an issueIt is true that in the initial release of World Restructuring we are not planning to consider time zone distribution when creating worlds. Part of that is so we can get the primary aspects of the system in and gather data about how the system works given the metrics we are using for balance. We want to compare apples to apples to give us the clearest information. This also will allow us to have a new baseline to compare against modifications to the metrics used for balancing the teams. We also are discussing some other ways to address “off hours” play, so stay tuned for more info as we can share it.

Are only WvW play hours, not all play hours, considered in the population calculation?Yes, we only use play hours in WvW when doing the population calculations.

How Many Alliances can be on a team?There is not a clear answer here other than “however many there need to be.” The focus is on getting the population balanced and not specifically on limiting the number of alliances per team.

Are you planning to update the API?Yes. There will need to be some updates to the API to support the new system. Beyond that, I do not have details.

Is repping a guild the same as selecting it as my WvW guild?No, repping is independent from selecting your WvW guild. You still will be able to rep whatever guild you like in WvW without changing the world the system places you on.

What is next? What comes after World Restructuring?Whoa now! We should not get ahead of ourselves. World Restructuring is only one of the irons we have in the fire so we are talking about things post World Restructuring. These are things we are not ready or able to discuss yet but we’ll update you when we have more things to relay.

BUT! We have more PVE content coming to WvW! Mounts! GAG

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