Karagee.6830

The truth of the matter is they would not even need changes to the game mode to fix 90% of the problems. Other than class balance which they do patch for and it's neither here or there, the far and away biggest problem for WvW is numbers balance. To balance the numbers you only need someone with 3 working brain cells to decide on a transfer policy that encourages flows towards less populated servers and discourage or outright prevent stacking and flows towards the same overpopulated servers. This does not require any change, it only requires a monkey to change the cost of the transfers and close/open servers as appropriate. And if they don't have reliable stats on participation to base these decisions on, then this should be driven by actual performance. Servers with the best performance every relink should either be closed or have prohibitively high transfer fees. This will drive towards a workable equilibrium albeit indirectly.

Allegedly I got reported by some genius from Jade Sea for cheating because I capped a camp, on a warrior, while he went invulnerable. They are all special cases on that server.

Sounds like someone who can't just play and needs help to kill people 1v1. So many lines of whining.

Look, we had a honest conversation with them about it and they openly said they do it because everyone can do it, Anet not fixing it means it's allowed. On top of that they argued Anet isn't banning anyone for it anyway. We got that chat screenshotted and reported for botting, but they are still doing it, so... The minimum they can do is clarify if this counts as exploit or not. So if the Deso people (who change guild tag but are the same people) are right and this is tolerated/ok, then we can all happily do the same and make siege (both offensive and defensive) irrelevant.

Ok Anet, please confirm this is allowed so we don't need to use siege and we can just warclaw jump into any objective and port our friends. Imagine getting on lords with a 30 second grace period before it goes contested and no way for scout to know there are enemies inside as all gates and walls are intact.

Dear Anet, if you incapable of preventing people from jumping inside keeps and towers and then porting their friends, then at least ban them. We have screenshots of people doing it. We have screenshots of people openly admitting to it and saying because it can be done, then it's allowed (a certain Desolation guild's bright minds) etc. We report every time we see it (hard to do since you there is no easy way to do it) and week after week they are at it. Have some self respect, Anet.

Playing time is variable within a week and between a week and the next, but surely 8 weeks and 56 days is a large enough sample to draw pretty solid conclusions about AVERAGE participation.

RoS is MightyTeapot's effect probably. I wouldn't mind playing with some German servers for example, there are people who do some organised roaming on some of them at the times I play and it would simply mean we would be able to do even more damage (and possibly not be outnumbered). And yeah instead of having 1 fee they should open every server (for moving, not new accounts those should be locked if necessary) and have dynamic pricing for transfers. You want to transfer to Gandara? Cool, give us 5k gems. Wanna transfer to, say, Fort Ranik? It's free or give us 50 gems, thank you. If that's not enough increase the gem cost even more.

Yeah nothing is stopping them from linking 3 servers in the same match

Lol no, you moved the goalposts and you are trying to do this again even though I told you I'd be fine being automatically split in the dumb way you seemed to suggest or deleted and moved. Nobody is married to the name Gandara. Otherwise explain in detail how you think creating 3 new servers or deleting 3 would work and then we can have a meaningful discussion without you reframing the discussion every time so you can backpedal. In your last paragraph is the essence of the problem. If you can't discriminate between people playing 50 hours a week and people playing 30 minutes a week (your assumption, not mine) then there is no way you can make ANY system work, not the current one and not alliances. Regarding the community alliance, I reject your idea it suggests Gandara has huge numbers and it's rightfully closed and without link. It only suggests that there are a lot of people on the server who enjoy playing with each other and have stood together despite (and probably due to) being royally screwed for years by Anet. Other servers have similar plans, including the bandwagoners. Note that I'm doubtful I would join that Alliance as I would go with my guild and that doesn't seem to be the preferred option, so I have very limited stock in all of this. Lastly I'm not sure what you meant earlier by 'who takes the difficult targets'. I attack everything on the border I'm on, including T3 keeps and garrison trying to stay ahead of defenders backcapping and avoiding large groups. If they pull EWP and a large blob comes that's life, next time I contest the garrison and go again before they can pull it once more. The only target we usually leave is the NE tower if it's tiered and has the watchtower upgrade as yoy can't sneakily attack that. I've sneaked SM castle in 3 people as well in the past, so, again, please clarify what you are asking.

Gandara is never T5 when we have a link and we're not outnumbered most of the day. Neither is Desolation. However this is a dumb argument because everyone without link ends in T5 and unfortunately we have no way to know the actual participation numbers to understand which servers are the largest and the smallest and the scale of the gaps between one server and the next. If you were to eliminate Gandara (which according to Anet is the largest server on EU other than BB) most people would simply all move to another server together. I'm pretty sure nobody would object to that, but it seems silly to do this for the alleged largest server. It's entirely possible Gandara will have their own community Alliance as well, there have been talks between guilds about this. The expansion method seems to have flown right over your head. That is not how you create 3 new servers (ie. you don't turn server A into server B+C, you add server D and encourage transfers towards that server). If for some reason beyond human comprehension you were forced to split 1 server into 2, then yeah split the largest servers.

Typically Gandara has open tags at the weekend during primetime and occasionally during prime time the other 4-5 days. If they leave the server, presumably we get unlocked but since fairly large guilds have in fact moved out before and we have remained locked, that isn't sure either. If we get unlocked someone else will move in. Open tags (ppt ktrains) are a dime a dozen, if you have people they someone will eventually tag up.

It seems to me you don't fully grasp the simplicity of the process. Reduction: you remove 3 servers and give everyone on those server a choice of where to move (same language etc). Then they should still encourage moves to specific servers by pricing the transfers differently between different servers. People should be able to transfer for free to almost empty servers. Expansion: you create 3 new servers, all new accounts should be placed on those servers and you have free transfers for all existing accounts to those servers for a period of time. Note that if these servers remain largely unpopulated, it would simply mean you are still in the current situation with whoever is linked to those servers being screwed for 2 months. Unfortunately this solution is more complicated, as EU servers can also have a language other than English.

You don't know that the new system will do that. However, you do know that the current system does not do what Anet say it should. Locking transfers prevent bandwagoners stacking on a single server. And that's all that it should do. If they want to split to 3 servers great, just prevent people to go to a single place, either for a period of time or simply close a server as soon as it receives a certain number of transfers. This is not a complaint about Gandara being unlinked AND closed for a year, this is simply to prevent the ugly stuff that goes on on T1 and repeats every 2 months. Frankly, from my personal perspective, it does not affect me in the slightest as the last time we reached T1 was when WSR was someone else's linked server and they won almost 300 skirmishes in a row. I can't understand why you insists talking about tags. If large dedicated guilds transfer out from a server obviously it will affect both the number of players and tags, doh. That's obvious. I do play on Gandara, I play in scarcely populated time slots and I usually roam in a party on enemy borderlands. When we have no tags elsewhere and we are forced to go EB or home one of us usually turn on a tag and that's that. This is how I play, so suggesting I would be affected by transfers and other tags is very disingenuous.

You still ignore the root of the problem at hand. Whatever they say should happen, will not happen, if they can't evaluate participation properly. If Anet could count players properly, it would be absolutely certain that Alliances would lead to stacking. The best players would join and recruit for the same top alliance and the filler, if determined correctly, would be in fact irrelevant. So locking transfers will not solve the problem of people transferring to the same exact server that 80% of other players find insufferable. Ok... Getting rid of the bandwagoners would also solve the transfer wave problem.

Conveniently you left out the part where I said Alliances will help, that takes some skill, friend. To repeat what I wrote before. If the way the activity is calculated is flawed then there will be no balance with alliances either, because a full alliance is only part of a team. Alliances give some control over participation (up to 500 people) and hopefully will prevent bandwagoning transfers, but it doesn't solve the problem that Anet can assign you 800 people who have next to no participation over a week of WvW because Anet are dumb that way and they consider these players 'active'. You follow? So your exceptional Alliance of handpicked 500 players may end up being outnumbered 2:1 all day long because of how Anet calculates things. The bottom line here is: remove 3 servers (or create 3 more), prevent transfers during the first 3 weeks of each linking period and count correctly each player's activity and you have already solved 90% of the problems without having to implement a new system. In fact, this would be better for Anet as they would still get payments for transfers.

Look, if they counted total player hours in a week correctly Gandara would not be even remotely close to the most WvW populated server n EU. I don't care that German servers have massive blobs at 6am CET, I don't care about the Spanish speaking north americans who play on BB, it's obvious and understandable that different servers have different coverage. What I am saying is that if you account for the fluctuations Gandara is outnumbered most of the day on several maps 5 days a week. And that's in T5, not T1. It only evens out when the other server with no link inevitably joins T5, but even then the difference with the worst linked server is significant. In any case, it's offensive to anyone's intelligence to claim that Anet can't count total hours per server spent in WvW over the 2 month linking period. They can, but they don't use the data, at least in any discernible or vaguely intelligent way, otherwise the stacked servers full of bandwagoners, who transferred there 2 months earlier, would be ALWAYS be stripped of their link the following time (even if they are linked servers and not the host). It's simple logic and simple math.

Alliances can't fix flaws in how they calculate participation and make decisions based on it. It can mitigate it to some extent. Let's say a team is made up of 1500 people, you can stick together with 499 people in an Alliance and you know what to expect from them. The remaining 1000 people will be assigned to you by Anet. It may be other alliances, likely smaller, it may be individual players. Either way, you don't have any control over this process, how these players are selected and why, however they will be assigned to your team based on calculations and algorithms that we know not to be fit for purpose (not now and not ever in the past).

I don't think you understand the situation with Gandara. Gandara has participation only at the weekend. Now, if you count the number of people who log in into wvw they probably have a lot, but if you counted the played hours they have less than many other servers at least 5 days a week. Gandara is often outnumbered on home and/or EB for long stretches any day and any time that is not reset or Saturday. And that includes near non-existent participation in the morning and central part of the day. This is what pisses people on Gandara off: there are never queues, 5 out of 7 days of the week they are outnumbered on home and/or EB plus on the other borderlands throughout the day and they are always unlinked and closed to transfers despite all of the above. This is why everyone knows that what Anet say (which has never been clear, to be perfectly honest) and what they actually do are very different things. And this is why nobody in his right mind would believe they use total number of hours played (for people who play more than, say, 20 minutes per session to discriminate between wvw players and people doing dailies in pve gear) per server and then match 1, 2, 3, 4+15, 5+14, 6+13 etc. because...you would have much less variability in the pairings. The only thing that would convince me they have a non-idiotic and non-subjective system is to see the numbers and how they impact the decisions on links. Vague, unintelligible explanations simply won't do. And let me repeat an obvious consequence of all this: alliances will be better, but they will suffer from this same issue. And since alliances will make transfers useless, they may as well start counting properly right now.

I just want to add one thing to this discussion: Alliances are NOT going to fix the issue of Anet being unable to count active player hours properly (if Anet's people could count, we wouldn't be in the current situation in the first place) and 1 maxed out alliance is going to be only part of a team, so the players' control over numbers will be limited to that.

The logic behind linking is sound, but the implementation is demented and it's even worse when you consider how long they kept this stuff going. If they were counting total ACTIVE player hours (ie. not people who play 5-15 minutes a day to do 2-3 dailies and log off) and pairing the 4th most active server (in EU) with the lowest etc, it might work properly. But that is still predicated on the fact that there is an enormous difference between the top most active 3 servers and the bottom 3, which is unlikely in my view (ie. 4th+15th will greatly outnumber 1st + nobody). Anet could have done many things to spread out the population starting with incentivising transfer to certain servers and disincentivising moving to or leaving other servers (by using dynamic pricing for transfers). There is a fundamental flaw of a system where 3 servers get no link, but transfers are definitely part of the problem as well (even for NA), because if they had different pricing to move to different servers (depending on active players statistics) and they locked transfers at the beginning and the end of the linking period, leaving 3-4 weeks in the middle when transfers are allowed, they could manage and spread out the population. But of course anything that curtailed transfers would lower revenues, so it's never going to happen.

These are mostly good suggestions except maybe 2 and 5 as 2 would do nothing for zergs with a ton of cleanses and you can't pigeonhole people into playing for ppt or you'd lose a chunk of the playerbase. However, 1 yes, very much so, if you can nerf warriors' cc to do basically zero damage in wvw, then you can fix this too. 4 yes, yes, yes, remove downstate forever at the very least if you are outnumbering people: just give people a debuff if they are outnumbering others, I'd go as far as to say that outnumbering should apply a debuff/buff that affect stats exponentially the more someone is outnumbered. It won't do anything for small groups getting stomped by zergs but 3 v 6, 5 v10 it would be significant. 6 addresses the mother of a lot of problems with wvw that leads stacking on some servers. As people have repeated to death they will never do this, because they like the money coming in from massive waves of transfers.

it's not so hard to put together 1 chart with every server population during each hour of the day without server names. This will also show what the difference really is between the most populated and the least populated server (wvw-wise). We all know that a link makes a huge difference in numbers, therefore aside from stacked bandwagoning servers (which are the by-product of Anet genius transfer policies) the rest will be closer than people think. And I'm talking over the 24h period, as different servers have obviously different time slot coverage. I mean, it's a chart with 15 lines and 24 data points for each series for crying out loud. The fact that they have something to hide and/or the system used to make the decision is dumb, to put it mildly, is that Gandara has no link, no queues, is outnumbered on most maps (today, Saturday, at some point outnumbered on every map including EB and home) and...it's closed and has been closed for a year. Basically the only time Gandara has been opened to transfers is when they tinkered with server caps and everyone ended up open because they went from full to very high. Edit: I have to add that a lot of people suspect the decision is not made based on numbers or statistics actually. Gandara has tanked before to artificially depress numbers into almost nothing and get a link and it resulted in...no link. Business as usual. This was with pretty much with every major guild not playing wvw and no tags at any time of the day. People would just do dailies and log off.

When can we expect to see the numbers these pairings are based on? We don't need to see the name of the servers just understand if there is any sort of logic to this or you pull things out of you backside. Why don't you do it for NA since it would be harder to identify the specific servers and there are fewer variables (language, BB etc)?

Any strong evening/night capping server + German server link should be outlawed in principle as they would have pretty much 24h coverage