Karagee.6830

Seems like we're going in circles and I'm honestly mesmerized that almost a week later you still haven't grasped the overall problem. Anet using a benchmarking system based on 1 server out of 27 would only explain why we're permanently locked, the problem here is being locked and without a link for the longest time. Admittedly there is anecdotal evidence that Anet is doing that as strange things happen when we lower our population and it appears people think they did the same in the US. You have presented no proof Kodash was this server before Gandara and that they were always unlinked. All of this, if proven, would simply strengthen the case for anet not assessing populations as they claim they do and they link servers in irrational ways. So be my guest and provide evidence. I wasn't reading forums or playing wvw when you say this happened probably. I have no recollection of someone, anyone, ever, mentioning that Kodash was permanently full and unlinked for 10-12 months at a time before you made this claim.

I want to mention another interesting fact. Tonight we'll welcome Blacktide+Miller's Sound to T5. Blacktide (the host) is a medium server that just dropped from high and MS (the link) was high until Gandara started tanking and is now very high. I'm sure there is a logical explanation for this pairing considering the multiple Full+Full teams that @Chaba.5410, or some other brave Anet's defender, will be able to explain to us based on logic and the stated Anet's policy...

Again backpedalling and changing the goalposts: you used Kodash as an example of a constantly full server and with no link for a year, without providing any evidence whatsoever about your claim. And you used Kodash to say Gandara shouldn't complain that much because one other server was in exactly the same situation (failed to prove this, despite repeated requests, but yeah) years ago. So please, spare us this kind of narrative.

In the Beta me and my guild ended up playing against 90% of Gandara. We roamed together with another party of guys from DL that we have fought bitterly several times previously and we know them well. They are good fighters, they are almost as sneaky as we are with siege, have a similar propension to jumping enemies when they see them and have slightly higher numbers than us and crucially they always had dedicated support. I have to say it was very enjoyable as we had numbers to do more damage than normal and also we could see where our tags were as we share one or more guilds with other people on Gandara. We knew before Beta that logically speaking it would make more sense for us to team up with guys like that than with the rest of Gandara and so we used our own guild for the Beta and not larger containers like most people did (btw this is where the 'stacking' is going to come from, alliances crowding specific time slots and alliances elite at something, be it ppt or fighting, recruiting or joining up with equally skilled and like-minded people). Ultimately I think Alliances will be generally good, 500 is a lot of people and nobody should have any trouble getting enough people they like to play with, especially if they are a commander or a guild leader and they have enough sway to bring the people they like with them. If you are an open tag commander once your regulars are with you the moving parts don't matter as much as long as they are not toxic people.

I'll tell you who: the people that want to play with the host server and they can't because the host server is full and locked for 2 years. So yeah, rather than removing a tier, if EU participation is much higher than NA then keep 5 tiers and give us 2 or 3 new servers. It does not remove the bandwagoning transfers, but that's a problem for T1 only and it will make all other tiers, including T5, more enjoyable and balanced in time. Of course they could restrict bandwagoning transfers as well, if they really wanted to, and sort also the other major problem with the game mode.

Thing is though. The alliance limit is 500 people. Do you have more than 500 people you know and enjoy playing wvw with? Because the natural thing to do would be to all be in the same alliance, wouldn't it? I have a hard time thinking Gandara pulling together all people who want to play together could fill an alliance, but maybe I'm wrong. And before new teams are put together you can always recruit people/guilds you enjoyed playing with in you own alliance, wouldn't you? So yeah my suggestion may have problems if there are large swings within alliance populations, because if an alliance suddenly double in size because 2 merged or halves, it would be hard to assess a previously acquired rating would not be very accurate and you'd have to go deeper. But yeah I don't know. I suppose matching alliances and people simply based on participation and the moving up or down may be much easier to implement.

Yes and you can do the exact same thing with alliances, except in that case you are not limited to who is online at what time, you can pick from all the alliances when you create teams. You can still game the system and create distortions probably, if an alliance goes from 10 average players one match to 200 skilled players the next, but number limits for teams would take care of that partially and then the alliance 'rating' would adjust based on their match performance.

Exactly.

I'm just saying they can rank and mix alliances in teams the same way the rank and mix players in pvp. And there would be no off-peak shenanigans in all of this because the matches and teams would be determined based on the overall population of alliances not based on who is online at one time or another. In pvp terms it would be the same as matchmaking with every ranked pvp player online and available all the time. A system where one goes up and one goes down is not needed if the teams are similarly sized, which is the whole point of alliances. So you can match teams who are similar in strength based on the alliances within the team and their estimated strength based on previous results Well, it might create a match with 5 Platinum 3 and 5 Silver 2 players, obviously....but that's not what I said. I said 5 platinum 3 on one team and 5 silver 2 on the other, didn't I?

What exactly is the danger of opening Gandara? That from being this mythologically largest server we double or triple in size? Are there enough players on EU for it to happen? To match BB Gandara should increase its population by 50% looking at K+D numbers, so how about this: set us to full when we reach BB's numbers. In other words, use BB's numbers as the benchmark and threshold to determine if the unlinked servers (which are going to be permanently unlinked just like BB) are full or not. At worst we will end playing each other T5 with similar numbers, but seeing BB can compete against linked servers I very much doubt that would happen. This solution requires only simple manual changes on Anet's part...

Ok I went for the hyperbole, but silver players do exist and in large numbers. So 5 Platinum 3 players v 5 Silver 2 players, possible or not? In wvw terms in the current system, it would be like pitting the strongest team against a medium or low population server on its own. I think Bronze is mostly there to cripple your rewards if you don't play pvp enough.

Eh your ability to misunderstand is uncanny. The tiers in pvp are divisions, things like Platinum 3-1, Gold 3-1, Silver 3-1, Bronze 3-1. The possibility of 5 platinum 3 players (alliances) facing 5 bronze 1 players in a ranked conquest match is...zero. Just so we are clear: there are people in Platinum 2 with a win rate of around 55%. Those people would have a 90%+ win rate if they were playing against Bronze 1 players and not similarly ranked players.

Yeah and what happens after you have been outnumbered for a week? You drop a tier and the following week things are balanced. Exactly to which tier should we drop to have a fair match? T6? T7? The point is we almost never have good, fair fights and we are stuck in that condition for 10 months at a time without being able to do anything about it ourselves because we can't even get guild members on our server. So you are saying the solution is splitting our guilds, playing with people we don't want to play with, playing against our friends instead of with them and destroy our community? And maybe we have to pay for this as well? Don't you think it's more likely people would simply stop playing the game at all than going down such a path? Besides think about it: if they let us transfer for free to a medium server (no 500 gems), we'd likely all transfer together and lo and behold, Blacktide suddenly goes from Medium to Full and has no link for a year. Whoopsies. The problem is not the name Gandara, the problem is that the system is not fit for purpose, so either let us be like BB (and open us) or rotate the unlinked servers among all Full and Very High populations servers. I urge you to think of a viable practical solution that does not involve completely destroying communities because you know what? After us the problem will not go away. If we move to a different server, that server will have the same exact problem and if we kill our community and split to 10 different servers, the only thing we would achieve is to simply shift the problem onto the next server in line: likely Desolation and after them SFR and Riverside. Maybe they should also start transferring now?

What are you talking about? It's like giving welfare benefits to rich people instead of unemployed poor people because the rich spend so much money that they have less left at the end of the month as a percentage of their income. Because Gandara has a us v everyone and us v Anet attitude to being unlinked and full, it doesn't mean that we should be in this situation for years. Spread the pain if you can't fix the problem. If they rotated every server each server would have to suffer 2 months with no link every 2 years and 2 months, instead your bright idea is that the same people to suffer all the time in perpetuity. If they weren't taking a vacation when they have no link they would be competitive. We nearly lost to Desolation twice last relink, it really came down to the last skirmishes and Desolation went from 40k K+D to 83k in a week after they got a link. So you are saying that the only way for Gandara to get out of this situation would be to destroy itself? Ok... Yes and we are asking not to be triple screwed: if you want to leave us unlinked for 1 year then don't leave us locked for 2 years or vice-versa. Regarding scoring you fail to understand a simple thing. In our current match BB greatly outnumbers everyone at night and AG greatly outnumbers everyone in the morning. With such disparity they can force whoever they want into third place: the PPT usually looks like this during these times: 1st 250-300; 2nd 50; 3rd 30. Last month we had one night when the PPT score was 440-2-0. I cba quoting every single snippet. Just because Gandara is more resilient to being unlinked, due to having a closer, long-term community than others, it does not mean we have a higher long term population than servers that occasionally get unlinked and quit playing when they do because they have no community. As I said with Desolation depressed numbers they almost beat us twice and it came down to the last skirmishes on a Friday. So this ideas of yours are bizarre to say the least. As I said above you are advocating that we destroy our community because we are punished for having one. If they want to keep us unlinked forever they should turn us and another server into BBv2.0 and BBv3.0 and balance things that way. You have to realise that we have not been able to get people on the server (which you say is very likely not to be the most populated) for 2 years except for 1 week when everyone was open.

I mean that if Gandara population is the benchmark against which the server sizes are set, then we can make about 15-18 servers full and locked by striking even harder. In the past 3 weeks 14-15 servers (out of 26) became suddenly Full or had their population increased by at least 1 tier. Now this may be just a coincidence, but it is at least suspicious and would explain how Gandara has been full for 2 years (except for one week a year ago when Anet clearly did something manually as all servers suddenly became open). Remember, being always Full is part of the problem and if this how things work, then we cannot ever become open unless Anet does something manually to override the general system.

And you know this because it has been tried before? We have one example that works and no example that does not work, don't we? When I say BB works in its own way, I mean that their situation is not ideal, but it's also nowhere as bad as Gandara's.

That they can manually set things is evident as BB has a much larger population than Gandara and it's never full. So it's just a matter of wanting it. BB works in its own ways: it does not have a population large enough to contend for T1 but large enough to be sort of middle of the pack. So if everything else is worse, then yeah create 3 BB with a much higher Full threshold than the other servers and then never give these 3 servers a link. Creating 3 new servers would be a cleaner solution, but this would work also. Until we have alliance in the next 10 years.

Ok and because the system doesn't work and it's the only one we have: either make 3 servers like BB (if it can be done for 1 it can be done for 3) or rotate the servers in the sin bin for 2 months. That is only fair. It can't be that only 1 server has the worst of all possible worlds for stretches of almost 1 year.

So you seem to agree with Luranni or whoever it was on the other thread that the sudden increase in full servers on EU may be due to Gandara lowering its numbers on purpose. If that's the case we have a tool to hold Anet to ransom, as manipulating our active numbers can kitten the whole system...

Right: so instead of having a clean 8 week period when everyone's locked in they decided, again, to go down the rabbit hole of having a transfer window with heavy restrictions. That doesn't change much except it seems something likely to delay the whole process or making it fail completely due to incompetence. There is a simpler solution than transfers: shorten the season's length to 6 or 4 weeks and draw match ups between teams in a more logical way (ie. the same way pvp works so a team with 3 platinum alliances shouldn't be matched with a team with similar sized bronze and silver alliances) not by sending teams up or down a tier. With more parity in numbers you won't have lopsided, unbearable matches anyway. Then you only need to run a routine to assemble the teams at the beginning of the month. They could also easily rank alliances (and the players within the alliances) the same way they rank players in pvp and then organise the following season's matches based on the ranking of alliances within a team (just like a conquest match won't have 5 platinum+ on one side and 5 bronze on the other). If that was the case, a 4 week team window would be better than 6 or 8 as it would allow for a more frequent mixing of alliances. Let's be clear players will be attached to their alliance, not quite to their team in any scenario anyway. No transfers allowed, as you can restructure alliances and individual selections every month.

Well, my friend, you'd only be staying for the community but since you play outside the only times we have good participation (even after the strike is over) I think you're right in asking for advice. You are likely to be in a tight spot most days. I roam evrry night with some americans from 1 hour before reset to 1 hour after reset plus other times if I feel like it or I need pips to get to diamond. But yeah most of our server participation comes from raids and tag play at the weekend, so...

No I'm trying to use it to disprove the notion that since we are full we must have enough people playing. Those are fluctuations which are physiological in different time slots. Take note that my claim was that we are outnumbered on home or EBG or both for long periods of times in T5 which has the lowest participation among all tiers. And we are still outnumbered when people are mobilised to defend, sometimes even after a tag comes. I didn't claim we are outnumbered in a vacuum (read: roaming on enemy borderlands for example or while we have a 200 PPT score or it's 2am on a Wednesday).

Then, unlike what I have done so far, I would actually say they would be either lying about the numbers or lying about having an algorythm to determine automatically which servers are Full and which aren't. Something's gotta give, you can't have your cake and eat it. Please provide context about your matchup and which site you are using. The K+D numbers often lag behind in the API but are very much in line with the game numbers. Some differences are due to websites lagging behind and smoothing the numbers (because sometimes they do not update for several ticks, strings of the same numbers were reported when the Api was released)

Is this impression of being outnumbered also reflected and corroborated by enemy servers having a mid-300 PPT tick when you see the little red icon and generally a more pedestrian 200+ tick while you are hovering around 50 and can barely defend your EB keep and garrison and sometimes not even those? I'm curious.

You implied I was trying to do this on 'a server that gave up from reset' which is the exact opposite of the everyday reality on Gandara and I wasn't planning on doing this while tanking. An exemplary strawman argument, bordering on trolling, if I ever saw one.