blp.3489

When a team is made up of many guilds with no control over what guilds you are teamed with, it is virtually impossible to get a long term dominant team like Mag as a server. Even if 500 players from Mag form a guild, they will only be a minority on the team they get assigned to. I'm not sure if there will be transfers, it could be just: join a guild with the people you want to play with.

Just as an interesting (to me anyway) thought experiment: I wonder if it would be possible to come up with a rating system that would give a somewhat accurate approximation of a player's combat ability/history based on a few calculations each time a player is killed. If each player had a rating that went up and down based on the kills they make and the kills they experience, it might be possible to produce a somewhat meaningful rating. When a player is killed you could add up the ratings of all the players that have damaged that player and form a ratio to the rating of the player that was killed. You could then add some amount of rating to each individual "killer" based on the ratio of the killing group total rating to the killed player rating and adjusted by the percent of the damage done by that individual killer. If a group of highly rated players gank a low rating player their rating is only increased by a small amount. If you only tagged the killed player for a small percent of the total damage then your rating is only increased by a small amount. The killed player would have their rating lowered based on the same ratio of total killer ratings to their own rating so being ganked by a large group or by a group with much higher ratings than you would only result in a small loss of rating while a highly rated player killed by a low rated player or group of very low rated players would take a larger hit to their rating. I'm wondering if such a system could be the basis for some prestige with the best players acquiring the highest ratings. If it turned out to be reasonably accurate it could be factored into the WR system so that a guild full of skilled players wouldn't be considered the same as a guild of equal size full of not so great players, or even for distribution of individual players without guilds.

I'm pretty sure that you just need to check your WvW guild in the interface and that what guild you represent is irrelevant. Objective claiming is an interesting point I hadn't thought of. Did objective claiming use the guild you were representing or your wvw guild during the betas? Does anyone remember? One can't say for sure but I doubt that there will be enough maxed out guilds to make balancing an issue. If guilds are distributed based on size/hours the maxed out guilds will be spread over all the teams and I just can't see there being enough to not leave significant room for balancing with smaller guilds. What could be interesting is that every team will likely end up with at least one or two large guilds. At least if large guilds become common.

You can get three ascended armor and an ascended weapon from the Wizard's Vault for starters.

The maximum number of players in an alliance is 500 and the max in a guild is 500 so alliances don't add that much, they just let you stay in your guild instead of joining an umbrella guild.

What do you mean by this?

I think it might be useful for you to write this out again. Perhaps avoid using the term "server" in favor of "team" unless you are really talking about existing servers. It isn't clear to me what you mean by "matches of 2 servers matched"?

If so the question becomes to what extent competing for spots on maps with 2000 non-mag players will reduce Mag's ability to dominate.

But does "WvW Update" just refer to giving us the text update on what they have planned, that we just received, or an update to the actual WvW system? I'm guessing the former but hanging on to the hope that they will just put the WR beta system into permanent play relatively soon.

There is only room for 500 players in a guild so at most 500 players from the Mag server can join the Mag mega-guild. Based on an estimated 2500 players per team, even if they max out the 500 they will be mixed in with 2000 players from other guilds. So they are outnumbered 4 to 1 by non Mag players in their team. If Mag make 2 mega guilds the odds are those two guilds will be placed on different teams. Depending on the team-making algorithms the days of permanently dominant servers are likely over. That is not to say that teams won't be constructed from time to time which might prove to be dominant until the next team reset. I don't have the experience to know whether 500 players is enough to dominate a match even while sharing the maps with 2000 other players, I'm currently assuming not.

Although there were problems, the somewhat successful beta tests give me hope that they can deliver WR in a timeframe measured in months. For some time now I haven't had any confidence in Alliances actually being delivered ever, most likely due to cancelation of the project due to lack of results.

From the update: "We don’t have a timeline to share now, but we’ll keep you updated."

"Servers" will have no real significance anymore. You are going to get put on a team with your wvw guild mates. Potentially everyone except your guild mates will be different after the next round of team making. You won't be able to transfer to a winning team, or any team, you will only be able to change your wvw guild, and that won't take effect until the next team assignment. If you don't have a guild you will get assigned to a team in a potentially random fashion and potentially everyone else could change the next time teams are assigned. It will be very hard for a guild to be as dominant as some servers are now as each guild will only make up a small part of the team. How effectively the team building algorithms will be in producing even matchups remains to be seen.

There is no linking under WR so you get your wish! (No linking of servers at least, now guilds will get linked)

I'm going to buck the glass half empty trend here and try to look at it with a glass half full perspective. I would like to suggest that we should all be celebrating this move by anet because what it does is transfer a lot of control from anet to the players. How? Instead of waiting for anet to someday implement alliances we can now get almost all the benefits of alliances using the existing code base, again, rather than waiting, potentially forever, for anet to implement the alliances system. All the alliances system was going to do was make the user interface a little bit more user friendly. Alliances were supposed to provide a way to make groups of up to 500 players that would stay together when teams were assigned. Guilds and WR already provide a way for 500 players to group up and be kept together when teams are assigned. Instead of anet providing a system for doing the grouping they are now leaving it up to the players to make use of guilds to do so. There are some disadvantages but compared to perpetual waiting we should be happy that the power has been put into our own hands. Sure, if they can't or won't add another guild slot some of us will have to juggle our guilds, but is that sufficient justification to keep all WvW players waiting for Alliances that might never come? Personally I don't think so. In the worst case, arrange with your guild leaders to allow you to leave and rejoin your other guilds as often as necessary or to merge some of the guilds. Dismissing the new system because it doesn't provide motivation for winning? Remember why any proposal for making winning matter gets immediately shot down? Bandwagoning you say? And how does bandwagoning happen? Transfers. And who controls transfers? Anet. Who controls transfers under WR? Guild leaders. You want to join the "winning team" but does the winning team want you? Right now anet allows you to transfer to whatever non-full server whose team is currently winning. With WR you have to find a guild on the winning team that's willing to take you. That makes bandwagoning harder, especially if you aren't a player that is going to contribute anything. Want to transfer your whole guild to a winning team? Only if you leave that guild and join one that is on that team. Under WR beta system you could not change WvW guilds until the next round of team assignments, yes you could change but it wouldn't take effect until the next team assignment round. So, even if you do get into a guild that was on a winning team that guild will only make up, at most, one fifth (estimate based on 2500 players per team) of the team after the next assignment so there is certainly no guarantee of still being on a winning team. So there is a foundation laid for introducing benefits to winning without bandwagoning or without as much bandwagoning. Losing your familiar server? Form a community guild with 500 of your closest friends. Alliances was nothing but a user interface feature, we can certainly live without it. The main question is can the players govern themselves through guilds? Even if not, at least they will be complaining in their guilds instead of in the forums. So, buck up and welcome that we have escaped the perpetual wait cycle, and start thinking about what guild you want to join or create! Please try not to put all your effort into displaying your disdain for me, I'm just trying to put forth an alternate perspective for discussion.

Unfortunately I can see enemy spies pulling enemy mesmers onto walls all day long.

I think it would be brilliant in several ways, both attackers and defenders would need to think about stability to a greater extent and there would be some incentive to place siege weapons out of range of pulls instead of against the wall. In some cases a small group of defenders could repeatedly pull the players using the siege weapons, forcing attackers to maintain stability versus watching netflix while waiting for a wall to fall.

If there are several classes that can give a boon basically permanently to a group, why aren't there more skills that give it permanently, or at least long duration, just to oneself for more of the classes? Say a signet of stability with the passive effect of perma-stability? Perhaps a relic of stability? Even as an elite skill. Even if you need to invest in concentration in order to make it continuous? Note that what I'm asking about here is the disparity between the boom uptime that some classes can provide to whole groups versus the miserly 1 or 2 seconds of the boon that many other classes are limited to. As a low skill player I am often mystified by skills that give 1 second of some boon.

If there are attacker skills that can pull people up and over walls, as there are, shouldn't those skills work the same way for defenders? Do they?

I think this is where perceptions differ. For many of those of us that are relatively new to WvW the idea of keeping track of enemy skill cooldowns for an enemy blob is just too far out of our skillset to imagine let alone do. I won't claim to speak for all noobies but I'm sure that I'm not the only one who can't pick out and react to all the skill tells on all the classes for even a single enemy player let alone a ten person group let alone a 50 person blob. For me personally having someone who has played the game since pre-release say "you tell me how I x and y and z" is a counter-intuitive response to someone who says that they aren't able to x or y or z. Positioning, reaction time, predictive capability, and so on are pretty abstract and as far as I have experienced are only learned by long term repetitive experience but if you can describe them in a way that people can put them into practice, even if only for the circumstance of getting pulled into an enemy blob, that would be great. From my own experience I think part of the problem is that open world requires so much less skill than pvp so players that are "good enough" to handle almost anything in open world arrive in WvW and perceive that things that happen to them there are OP, hence all the calls for nerfs. In open world enemies generally have one or maybe a couple of attacks and the few that do CC only have one CC move which generally isn't hard to predict. In WvW enemies have a dozen skills that they use in much less predictable ways, and the variety of enemies, i.e. classes and builds, that you might encounter is relatively large and, unlike open world where several enemies are most likely several copies of the exact same thing, you will encounter groups of enemies that are all unique and among them have dozens and dozens of skills. Not to mention that most open world enemies operate at a plodding pace of an attack every few seconds versus players using multiple skills per second multiplied by the number of players. Please note that I am not calling for WvW to be somehow nerfed down to open world levels of difficulty, just trying to explain some of the differences in perception. In the way of my usual pie in the sky suggestions, it would be cool if they had some hero-point-like places in open world where players could try out a very simplified version of PvP, say one player "transforms" into a mode similar to hero point NPCs, and another player can then challenge them. If the NPC capabilities were limited to an appropriate level then, with some skill, the challenger player should be able to prevail. I'm guessing that there are players that would be willing to play the NPC part, especially if there were an appropriate reward.

It strikes me that factoring the population during prime hours into the calculation of fullness would make sense. I'm presuming that servers are marked full in order to avoid queues and to avoid stacked servers. Servers that have relatively low populations during prime time probably shouldn't be marked as full unless their total player hours gets too high and they are dominating tier 1 matches. I'm curious what the downside of fewer tiers was. If it didn't result in excessive queues it seems like it should be an effective solution. Have they ever experimented with leaving the highest ranking servers without links to see how they fare? I'm curious what the effect of that would be.

I wonder if the devs have been diverted to the lag issue at the expense of the beta. I also wonder if the lag issue really is being created using overuse of rise as a form of protest.

Sorry to extend the hijack but I really like that the forced to waypoint after death option opens up a lot of possibilities for counter attacking the more isolated players trying to return to the zerg, especially when the zerg is deep in enemy territory. You have in a sense forcibly split up the zerg to a certain extent.

It's just a casual hypothesis but I suspect that trying to "balance" classes for all of open world, raids, strikes, fractals, sPvP and WvW is inherently problematic. Most importantly, the degree of group build synergy that you want in a ten person raid or strike is different than what you want in WvW. I am not advocating for it but at the extreme if there were absolutely no boon type interaction between team players then battles at all scales would be quite different and my guess is that numbers would matter less relative to individual player ability. My guess is that individual development would improve more rapidly relative to the current setup and there would still be huge potential for coordinated play without needing specific group compositions. I would argue that it would be more challenging and require more skill to optimize fighting than the "have ten firebrands" approach. Looking at the number of open world players versus WvW players one has to conclude that the people who want to play with composition based fight guild type squads are a relatively small group. A majority of people want to be a hero in their fantasy play rather than a cog in a machine. Group work is valued and is a big draw for raids, and we see the relative popularity of those. Importantly, the number of players who want to, have the time, and are capable of building up and effectively leading a good fight guild are a vanishingly small resource as well. In any case, Anet is going in the direction of more importance on team composition rather than less, so this is all a what if conjecture, but that's my take on how numbers could matter less.

I've never played EotM but, is there a reason to not make EotM a separate game mode? Let EotM and WvW compete for players? If it turns out WvW loses players just reduce the number of servers.