Arya Whitefire.8423

I mean it's theoretically possible to glom all the servers together, and to change the active data center depending on which is currently in prime time. But, it would be a lot of work, and the original wvw dev, not to mention the original gw2 infrastructure devs, are mostly long gone.

I think maybe I failed to make my point clear in my first post. On Maguuma the community as a whole is capable, for at least 10-16 hours a day, to take defended T3s, and make things happen. On every other (NA) server, this is no longer true, only the boon blob manders can break defended T3s, and make things happen. (With the exception of some crazy overstacked off-hours like SoS) The fix is not to ruin maguuma. The fix is to put the game back into a state where all of the players who could defeat maguuma don't feel they have to wait for a boon ball to show up to even have a small chance. And the way to do that is to end the boon ball meta once and for all.

Mag does tear apart the mediocre boon blob groups, if they can get enough actual maguumies on the map in question. But the actual good boon blob groups do generally eventually defeat mag, though it's a long drawn out war of attrition that isn't terribly fun for either side. When I was new to wvw, and much worse at it then I am now, groups of similarly skilled players to myself were very often defeating even the most organized groups in objective fights, especially defensive fights. The organized players did have an advantage but it was on the order of 10-20-50%. Now-a-days, it doesn't matter how many people we have, unless we're mag. The boon blob farms us til it gets bored, and then takes the objective. And that is true even of mediocre boon-blob groups. The organized group advantage is now 10x, and goes up from there as skill and experience are added. TLDR with power creep organized advantage has increased from 10-50% to 10-100 TIMES. The game is a wreck, and will stay a wreck until this is rectified.

No the real issue is that Maguuma is the last remaining community server in NA. There are a handful of other servers that still have communities, like FA, TC, AR, even SoS, but they are much smaller and limited to certain times of day.. The only groups that can challenge mag are the various insular boon balling groups that only play 2-5 hours a day 4-5 times a week. They simply don't have anywhere near the playtime or coverage that Maguuma is able to put in. To fix wvw, the sustain needs to go away, there needs to be room for a pug-mander with non meta builds and non-meta players to have at least a chance against organized meta groups in voice comms. That way new and less serious players won't be driven out of wvw every time a boon ball group logs in for their scheduled session. The outlier small scale builds should also probably be reigned in again, which would somewhat tone done individual player skill at the smaller scale as well. TLDR, sustain goes bye bye, kill rate increases 3-5X to match the 2012-2016 era, the pug-mander returns, and wvw becomes much more fun for the majority that would still be playing, if they hadn't been driven away by the humungous cliff that now exists between organized and less organized groups. It also wouldn't be a terrible idea to get rid of the 24 hour format, but that's another discussion.

If it is worth winning, people will take every advantage, just like they do with the current system. No system that retains 24 hour a day matchups or that bases world construction on historical average playtime will ever result in consistently fair or even interesting matches. Both need to go away for a new system to be worth implementing. Especially if you want anet to reward people for winning the matchups.

I put "win" in quotes since most people don't currently care about ppt. And yeah all but one of their accounts "loses", but the players themselves "win". And not only do they win, but they screw over an entire world or worlds who receive less player hours than anet's system was expecting them to have.

They, as a guild of real life players, get to "win" more matchups/seasons. Let's say you have a single guild alliance of 500 players, that they average 10 hours a week per player, and they all have 2 accounts. And for ease of setup, let's assume anet's averaging period is the same as the matchup period. The matchup period and averaging period can be different, but all that does is smear out the inequalities in team formation, it doesn't "fix" it. We'll also assume that this guild has been hopping around looking for fights previous to alliances, but will try to "win" once alliances start. First alliance matchup, the 2 guilds are assigned 2 worlds, each world is charged roughly half, 2500 player hours, to have these 2 guilds as part of them. The alliance picks one world, and plays only that world to "win". That world now has +2500 player hours, and whichever world they don't play on, has -2500 player hours. Since the "winning" world is getting the full 5000, and the other is getting 0. Next 8 week period, a new set of worlds is created. The guild this alliance just played on charges 5000 player hours to the world it is assigned to, the guild they didn't play on is charged 0. At this point 2 scenarios can occur: 1. They play the same guild again, anet's system "worked" 2. They swap guilds, anet's system just utterly failed, since now there is a world with 5000 extra player hours, and a world missing 5000 player hours. As you increase the number of guilds you can choose from, you benefit more, and decrease the odds that all of your guilds are assigned to the same world. Further, multiple alliances can coordinate to exploit even larger advantages, by coordinating to only play on worlds where multiple of their alliances are paired up.

To the extent they're just looking for fights, it kinda doesn't matter. Or to the extent anet greatly decreases the matchup time. But if they want to "win" the ppt game, and anet remains with an 8 week matchup time. Then what the organized groups with multiple guilds will be able to, on average have significant activity gains over guilds that are not doing the multi-account thing. And not only that, whichever guild the multi-account guild played last time, but isn't playing this time, will make the world it's assigned to weaker. You'd think you could counter this by using peak activity in the last year or 2, but that would just make most of the worlds the multi-account guild is assigned to weaker. Basically organized multi-account is a huge weakness in the proposed alliance system, and it will be exploited. Rather than trying to ban multi-accounting though, I think the solution should be to stop using historical average play time as the only or most significant balancing factor.

If there is a lot of multi-account playing going on, especially guild-centric multi-account playing, then it make's anet's concept of balancing by historical hours played stop working. I think the effects are small in the current system, but in the proposed alliance system they will be much larger.

This is pretty clear in my mind. If you owned Conflux+Slumbering Conflus, Anet implied your best bet was to wait for a new merchant to upgrade Slumbering Conflux. But then gave players who didn't wait an absolutely huge bonus. I wouldn't be so bothered about this if anet had erroneously given some people the mats to make another conflux. But instead they erroneously gave them the ability to completely bypass the LI+killproof hellscape that is raiding, or the catastrophic bot filled mess of pvp. Since reclaiming the erroneously given chests is probably off the table. I think the best outcome would be for anet to give a free chest to either: 1. everyone or 2. everyone who had say at least 2 legendary weapons and/or trinkers, possibly excluding aurora and vision.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. There must've been an error in the compensation script. Maybe the script was written before the decision to make Conflux non-unique was made.

The issue is not being unable to upgrade Slumbering Conflux. The issues is that owners of 2xConflux, were erroneously granted a free Legendary Reliquary, while also keeping their 2xConflux.

I am in the same position, owner of Conflux+Slumbering Conflux since right around when they were first added. Support is unwilling to help or acknowledge that an error occurred. I have heard from 4 people in game that received a Legendary Reliquary, with the only possible explanation being 2xConflux. One of whom just made the 2nd Conflux on Monday. Feeling rather left out, especially since I almost upgraded it, after hearing that the non-slumbering wouldn't go in the armory, but held off after hearing about the upgrade NPC.