godfat.2604

They can refund Icy Runestones by asking us to delete them, and refund 100G. I see no reason they cannot do this as well, it's just less gold we're talking about. Don't ask support if this item can be used anywhere else or exchange for something else. Support cannot do that. Just ask them to refund the gold you used to buy them, linking the item with a wiki page. If you got 16 left, ask for refund for those 16. When they accepted they will ask you to delete the items you want for refund. Don't delete them before they accept just in case. After deleting them, tell them you did, and they'll check the data on their side, and proceed to send you the gold for the cost.

Why reset it for accounts already maxed everything in the first place? Anet is just being lazy, nothing else. Edited: if I remember correctly, they also have a merchant to sell resetting? Why not just give players resources to buy it, and people can choose when to reset it?

It's a good question and I don't know. One idea is that once we want to restructure, we at least restructure half of the teams. So in the example, we restructure the least healthy 4 or 5 teams. It could be possible that, say, the overall activities reduced to 80%, and if we only restructure half of the teams, the originally healthy ones will become too stacked. If this is the case, we'll have no choice but to restructure all the teams. This is clearly not something can be done automatically easily. It'll require a few iterations to understand the best restructuring criteria and how to proceed, and how to communicate to the players before restructuring so that players can have time to plan around. I assume this should be communicated at least 1 month in advanced. This is a lot of manual efforts in the beginning of course. The advantages over automated restructuring every season (a month at the moment) is giving us a chance to prolong the communities built around the new teams, and also giving match making time to work.

I once proposed this and I'll propose again. Anet should have a health indicator for each team. If health is bad for a team, restructure it. If all teams are healthy, keep them as long as possible. Allow team transfer for individuals, and how it's limited can be discussed. Thinking more about it now, I guess Anet won't do it, because this requires Anet looking at it and intervene when needed. I don't think they want it, because it's clear they only want to put WvW into auto-pilot mode so that they can move their WvW team to somewhere else.

I guess we have no ideas unless Anet are sharing their algorithm. If we can get population equally first, certainly we can then try to make the strengths about the same, too, as long as we're not sacrificing population for that. However, I do not have confidence that Anet can properly determine strengths at all, which is going to be inaccurate anyway. Let's also think about this, if they can, why do we need to run the same teams for a month? Why do we even need to have tiers? We can just restructure for each matches, since they're going to be equal anyway. This is not happening, and we have enough of evidences. I do not think they have all the stats, nor do I have confidence that they can properly assess the team strengths at all, based on my WvW experience for the decade, and industry experience even though not in games. Collecting data is a very hard problem. First they need to know what they want to look at, that is they need to know the game very well (which we doubt right?), and secondly the tech might not be there to collect the required data if it's not designed to do that in the very beginning. Lastly, new ways to collect the data often do not have historical data. Years of data can be too much and not accurate, etc, etc. Right, and there are too many factors which can affect strengths. Think about it, if the commander in an organized guild cannot play today, or for the week, can the organized guild maintain even with their 80% of strength? Or will it drop to 0? It's very volatile to rely on a few players.

I am not talking about individual player skills. I reread what I said, I guess it's "a few skilled players" which was misleading. It's in the context of my example of 10 players. In the actual scenario, it's talking about a few organized guilds, not really individuals. @joneirikb.7506 mentioned the rest of what I wanted to say, so I'll save some time and please just refer to that. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks. We probably need to talk more about this because I think there are still too many people conflating population with match making. I'll add one more example. Consider there are 10 players in total, and 2 are very skilled and they can fight equally against the rest of 8. What if we create 2 teams with those 2 vs 8? Because clearly those 2 players will be in the same guild as a duo right? We'll also have a equal fight as stated. However WvW is a 24/7 mode. Let's assume everyone can just play 2 hours, and those 8 won't play together all the time because of course it's more difficult to get more players to play at the same time. What would happen? When those 2 play, they dominate the other side because not all of the 8 can play. When those 2 don't play, the other side will play against a dead team, which they just need 1 player to win. So which team will win in a week long match? To be clear, I think WvW is a 24/7 game mode, so strengths should not be the way to balance the teams. Teams should be balanced around the population, which will make the team strengths less volatile to be based on a few skilled players, and we balance the matches with match making with tiers. If people want to balance everything around strengths, eventually it'll become more like PvP so it's only open within 2 hours prime time. That's not WvW anymore. You're welcome to create a new mode called GvG, totally good with that, just don't kill WvW.

I personally prefer we look at how it was working back then. Before engagement, put fire fields and blast it, cast Empower (guardian staff 4). Note that those mights don't last long, definitely cannot be maintained. Empower is also rooting the players, it's very risky or impossible to cast during the fights. Standing still = death. Even for healing we need to call out small water or big water, and everyone blast them to heal. Much more coordination than today. I think duration is the key. Back then concentration isn't a thing either. Some suggest that we can reduce the cap of maximum duration for each boon. While it solves one side that the boons last for too long, it would be boring to cast a skill and then boons are capped as well. I still think we need to reduce the boon duration on the skills, so in order to cap the boons, everyone needs to cast their skills together at the same time, not just someone hit a button.

One more thing. Some people seem to assume that it's prime 2~4 hours vs off 20~22 hours. That doesn't make sense. We should assume more like everyone can only play for 2 hours, and those who play outside of prime also can only play for 2 hours. It does not make sense to compare 2~4 hours with 20~22 hours.

The impact of missing 1 in a 50 vs 50 is of course smaller than missing 1 in a 10 vs 10 competition. If this is truly a team effort, there's no reason to make 10 vs 10 score only 20% of 50 vs 50, otherwise it's just a population competition, limited by the map queue.

It required so much more coordination back when boons can't be easily maintained, and one misstep was an instant death. I am kinda amazed that people can say it needs more coordination nowadays comparing to say, before the infamous Feb 2020 patch. Balance, literally means finding the right balance between no boons and full boons. Not sure why we can't find something in the middle. It's never all or nothing.

Please tell them to forward the messages then, or find a way to contact the balance team, because I firmly believe the single most important problem for WvW is skill balance. Solve that so the combat can be more fun again, and guess what, population will be back again, making it easier to balance population, too. Skill balance is an important part of WvW, the WvW team can't just ignore it and it makes no sense if they have no saying on that.

If there are skill lags it means players are not dying fast enough. Sounds like a joke but I am only half joking. I miss the days when people need to dodge red circles and spellbreaker bubbles, or anything which once are deadly. Get boonball balanced properly and the lags would be gone quickly. Maybe consider a similar patch like the stupid Feb2020 one, just half all the healing and support skills across the board. Don't just do it literally but you get the idea.

It's more helpful to press ANet for making changes than asking the player base to change player behaviors. Why don't we blame who actually have the power to make changes, and don't let them go away with doing nothing? Oh yes, now we got world restructuring. To be clear, it's a good thing to have changes. We just need to press them for making more changes. Blaming players will never get us anywhere.

For the next link or restructuring, not for the current one. I do enjoy if I can play with the same few guilds for a year for example.

Surely they cannot join their Korean guild if they can't speak Korean? If they can't join their guild there's no way to guarantee they can still play together with world restructuring, unless they can still transfer to the same team via support ticket or something. I used to join quite a few random guild discord as well. The same happened to linked servers, too. I just can't play with them anymore unless I also transfer or get linked again next time.

If scoring should be based on population, why not make it more points when more players are standing in the circle capturing objectives? Or make it more points when one player is killed by multiple players. That would at least make it based on actual activity rather than handing out points even when people are idling or running into a wall... and a great excuse for everyone trying to stand inside a sentry circle. Forget about spreading out, right? It's also not clear to me if ANet is actually looking at the dynamic of population, or predetermine the supposed to be population, and make a static multipliers based on a fixed timeline as they suggested in the table in the post. What if a supposed to be lower populated time, actually has more activities? Is this dynamic at all? Edited: and of course, this is kinda walking back skirmishes, making it pointless.

I would like to support increasing PPK a lot so that those blob groups can match with the other blob groups easier, otherwise they would be able to manipulate the scores too easily by stop capturing or defending objectives to not gain scores, lowering their tiers to farm the other smaller servers (teams). If PPK alone can boost their tiers, the only way they can intentionally tank would be stop playing. Blob groups should only play against the other blob groups. It's unfun for any other groups. We should keep them in tier 1. Of course, the downside of this would be discouraging high risk play style, feeding the enemies. Maybe one way to address this would be making killing spree a thing. So PPK only starts to boost a lot when one side kills a lot in a short period. So as long as there's no mess suicide, PPK should remain low. I doubt if this is something ANet are willing to do though, beside tweaking simple numbers...

While this is a pretty wild idea and I don't think ANet will do it, I honestly do like it when I think about it. It better shows the population on the map so people can easily find where to chase the enemies or escape from, because I would certainly assume some of the maps are going to be empty, and I wouldn't want to keep swapping to figure that out. This probably also raises a question about, why not we just create overflow maps? I suppose for the sake of the old school scoring, objectives must be static and persistent otherwise it'll be too dynamic, making the whole scoring system even more pointless... I know winning or not become so pointless, but you see ANet is still using that to judge if match ups are balanced. We can't ignore scoring forever... It's an important tool to drive motivation, collaboration, and sense of belonging as well.

Thank you for being explicit about that. I am responding to your points below and making another wall of text: Yeah I think I did remember one of the ANet staffs did mention that they couldn't touch skill balance because that's on a separate team. I would encourage them to share this kind of information to us, but this shouldn't be the excuse for doing badly for WvW as a whole by ANet as a whole. We players are not responsible for how ANet structured their teams, and individual developers are not responsible to players. They're responsible to ANet, and ANet (leaderships) are responsible to players. If this structure didn't work well, ANet should change it. I did remember they announced internal structure change from time to time, but in the end I didn't really see improvements, or only in very short terms. We don't know what's wrong inside ANet. I would simply conclude that ANet don't really care about WvW for whatever reasons. No, of course not. There's a famous saying. Don't listen to what customers say, watch what they do. My answer to this is, yes and no. My experience is that what customers suggest can often be wrong, but what customers feel are usually real. Customers would say anything, including what they suggest and what they feel. Listen to what they feel, and listen to what they suggest to understand what they feel, because sometimes customers can't exactly express what they feel, either. In the end, ANet are responsible for their own products after all. Putting the decisions on customers is irresponsible because the customers can't really actually make decisions. To clarify a bit on this: The transfer I suggest was once mentioned by ANet but I don't know if they still keep this in mind. It's not about shuffling the teams, but allowing individual players to transfer to another team after the teams are already formed. It's the same as the old server/world transfer. I don't remember what constraints ANet did mention it should put behind this, but I'll suggest that anyone can transfer every 2 weeks by paying gems like before. The old constraint was every 1 week. I suggest we can raise it to every 2 weeks. People shouldn't transfer often. Also, team capacity like the old world should be put into places as well. Full - no transfer. Very high - very expensive, and so on. I think this is needed as an escape card for people who got stuck in a bad status or people who want to play with their (new or old) friends. Things are always changing, and we can't change teams so often, so we need to allow individuals to be able to change, or they might quit which isn't better. Just put constraints on that. I think if we allow individual to transfer, there's no need for waiting for months before settling down. I would argue they had enough data from years of beta and we suffered enough that we deserve immediate change. Of course if it's so bad like Mirror of Lyssa, maybe they should consider just shuffling right now. If it's proven bad and hurting, immediate action should be taken. I think we need to look at this from the perspective of the health of the game, rather than players. We should agree that ANet should strive for making everyone happy, or at least they shouldn't make someone so frustrated to just quit the game. Blackgate and Maguuma might have some good fun time in short term, at the cost of making it unfun for other players, to the point that they might just quit. This was not healthy for the game, and eventually losing players means everyone will eventually lose contents. This would go back to Blackgate and Maguuma and they'll hibernate again because it's unfun, waiting for the next fun time. This was a vicious circle. It's just losing players and making it worse and worse. Right, Blackgate and Maguuma couldn't really control this and this wasn't responsible for them either. It's on ANet to let this happen for years without trying to make some changes. Let's look at the economics. ANet made countless changes to make sure the economics were balanced. While sometimes they just did bad jobs like research notes are just annoying, but they did do something to change economics and the intention was right, just the execution was god awful. Remember the times when they opened Blackgate or Maguuma when everyone knew that that had the most population. What happened? They failed to properly handled that. Again, not the fault of players. Exactly, so we need to update the scoring system. Or they can have some other internal scoring for match making, like the very old glicko system which everyone hated, rightfully so because it's only designed for 2-player games, certainly not something like WvW. But ANet can think about something else, sure, show us ANet really know WvW (of course they couldn't, but I am happy to be proven wrong). I don't think this is necessarily the case. If we just claim that most players don't enjoy losing, then this game would be dead long ago, because you know, 50% of the players are losing, or 66% of the players if we think only 1st is winning. We can also look at PvP, that would certainly be dead long ago, and if match making is working correctly, all the players victory rate would be 50%, losing half of the time. Would anyone really complain about that? People shut good game when lost for a reason. That's quite pessimistic but I understand for so many years after all.

There are a lot of good points put in this thread. I wish ANet would take some time reading them and reflect a bit. Not just about population or match making, also about only balancing around boon balls, and constantly nerfing defense. I believe all are closely related to each others. Scoring, too, even though it's not touched yet. I also see people often conflate the ideas of match making and population balance. They're different and world restructuring only touches population but not match making. I would like to once again propose that we don't have to shuffle the teams so often. If we keep the same teams for 1 year or more, it's no different than the old worlds system, except under different world names. ANet could somehow come up with a health indicator, and as long as the current teams are healthy, there's no need to reshuffle the teams. We can run the same teams as long as 10 years if they're healthy, and it would be the same as the old worlds. As long as it's not healthy like Mirror of Lyssa that I heard of, we can schedule a shuffle. We need to stabilize the teams so teams can go to the right tiers, and allow individuals to transfer like the old system once in awhile so individual can also find the right tiers for them, instead of getting stuck. Of course population balance will change if we're not reshuffling the teams often, but I think match making is way more important than that, which is going to take time to reach a more stable status. Beside, I firmly believe to build a community larger than a guild, a more persistent team like the old world is definitely needed. Next, do something about scoring so that we can balance the matches better. Population is not going to be stable if matches are unfun. Only if matches are consistently fun, can population be more consistent. Didn't we learn enough lessons from Maguuma and Blackgate?

Spear suggestions to make it more fluid: * Imaginary Inversion: Cleanse a condition immediately. Under the effect of Clarity, cleanse 3 conditions instead. Keep the rest the same. * Phantasmal Lancer: Increase leap range from 450 to 600. Gain Swiftness when leap. Keep the rest the same. * Mental Collapse: Increase teleport range from 600 to 900. After resetting Mind the Gap, gain an additional new effect for 2 seconds. Under the effect of this new effect, Mind the Gap always grants Clarity when used, regardless hitting or not. Keep the rest the same. This tries to solve the issues for: * Poison can ruin the heal from Imaginary Inversion * Mesmer needs more Swiftness in general, especially for a melee weapon. Leaping is nice, but 450 is too short, and it's a phantasm skill which we're not going to easily waste just for mobility. It has to be very good to waste the damage and effects for mobility. * It's annoying to slightly walk backward to cast Mind the Gap after Mental Collapse. This makes it more comfortable to use and can be potentially used as an opening to gain clarity before entering the battle.

We used to have much less boon spam and much stronger boon strip, with slightly higher damage and worse healing, which was enough to kill a stack of zerg in under 5 seconds if they're standing on red circles, even with just target cap of 5 . Players will be dying fast enough to kill the next 5 targets, so I don't think target cap is an issue. I would welcome them to raise the target cap if it's feasible, but the thing is this usually creates a lot more computation (similar to collision) on the server, so I doubt their server can handle that. I think at this point we couldn't really point out a single reason why boon spam is such a big problem right now, because ANet kept making changes to make this worse, so all of them really added up. Just give a few examples: * Much stronger healing nowadays * Much more boons nowadays * Much less boon strips nowadays * Quite lower damages nowadays Given that it's clearly their intention to keep doing this, I suppose this is their intended gameplay, and we're just shouting to the void. I didn't enjoy pirate ship meta, but this is going to another extreme and it's ridiculously boring in a different level. I never thought the stupid ball meta can become reality.

Let's say I agree with this for now, I think a very important aspect is what your build does bring. I think for the most builds unless built to handle this in a very defensive or mobile or stealth way, there are too many more win buttons (as you called) which are almost the same. I am guessing your build has way more those escaping tools than most builds so you see a bigger difference. To me, there are just too many other ways to kill me, and this one isn't more deadlier than the others yet harder to pull, so it doesn't make sense to kill me this way.

As far as I can tell, the OP's argument is based on having a lot of stun breaks, CC chain is not really an issue because they can break stun multiple times. However being moa'ed will remove their stun breaks thus becoming an issue. I do see this difference however I don't think it's a big difference, comparing to like a long CC chain with 3+ CCs. This game has so many CCs that I see they're similar enough... and it's really not hard to chain many CCs either.