blp.3489

Immediately thinks of thieves forming a large guild. Whole zergs with perma-stealth...

Turning neutral was perhaps overdoing it, it just seemed like the natural consequence of being starved of supply, at some point the starving soldiers lose their interest in fighting for the side holding the structure. Probably just having the NPCs abandon the structure would be more realistic, but really the NPCs don't have any impact anyway. Dawdler's summary is probably better and more succinct. I have no idea how this relates to boon balls. Logically having the structure repair itself on capture should require at least a little supply, maybe you would pay the quartermaster, thereby giving them some reason to exist, but probably most players would just leave the structures in ruins. It might curb the urge to throw down six siege weapons if you needed to save some supply for repair though.

I was just wondering if the strategic aspect of play would be enhanced if objectives consumed supply and went neutral dropped tiers if they had no supply for a period of time. So, if your karma-train swooped in and took an objective and depleted the supply down to zero and left, after some period of time, if new supplies didn't arrive, the objective would revert to neutral tier 0. Ongoing consumption of supplies would simulate one of the core strategies in real world historical sieges, i.e. breaking supply lines and choking off supplies to starve them out. This would make supply management much more crucial with dolyaks and camps becoming much more important to defend and/or attack. If an enemy wants to hold one of the north towers on an alpine bl it needs to capture and hold north camp, else the tower won't upgrade and (if it was upgraded) will eventually go neutral drop back to tier 0. It would thus provide additional opportunities for small scale actions and might reduce the benefit of mindless zerging and make holding far flung objectives more difficult. You might also want upgrading of objectives to consume supply (from the depot) and be delayed if there weren't sufficient supplies. Perhaps even downgrade objectives if they didn't receive sufficient supplies. Sort of related to this, perhaps when you kill a player it should transfer some or all of their supply if you have the capacity to carry it? That would raise the price of getting wiped and repeatedly returning to a battle. It would also be a source of supply for roaming attackers.

If you think about this in the hypothetical situation where WR is in place and does a reasonably good job of matching total player hours of all the players on all the teams then an imbalance now will be a reverse imbalance sometime later, so not a big issue as long as you don't get to the point where the peak hours don't overlap. Although I doubt that would actually occur, if the WR system also took time of day hours were played into account it could avoid that problem. Consider another hypothetical situation where the matching is working as stated above but team size has also been doubled. The majority of the time there will be more players on the map which should lead to more enjoyable play for everyone most of the time. The downside is that during peak hours some players will get stuck in long queues, and those players won't like that at all. An obvious solution is to open up additional maps only during peak periods. Those maps could be new maps, a copy of an existing map, or possibly an EotM map if that was okay with players. Alternately, you could just increase the number of maps at all times. That would result in lower average players per map though and might worsen the karma train effect by making it easier for blobs to avoid one another as they mowed down undefended objectives. In a sense this is the current situation, in order to avoid queues they have added additional maps by creating more matches/tiers, and as we can see this has resulted in poor quality play on underpopulated maps during non-peak hours.

Would it help if they simply kept the host servers in whatever tier they ended up in in the previous linking? It wouldn't be perfect by any stretch but it seems like it would work better more of the time than having host servers move from Tier 1 to Tier 4 etc. the way they sometimes do now.

Perhaps Anet could enable pips and skirmish reward track progress on EotM whenever all the maps are queued. I'm assuming they have a valid reason to not have them all the time, those issues occurred before my time, something about out of control karma trains I think? I don't have the experience to know whether players will be okay with larger queues provided they can earn pips and skirmish progress on EotM. I'm hoping that WR will bring team numbers more in line and therefore mitigate imbalances at least at reset. I am also not sure how much of an issue such imbalances really are given the current general lack of interest in "the score" and the equal opportunity each world has to bring greater numbers of players at specific times, especially if WR does its job, and it should certainly do better than the current system with servers and links both of which have quite variable numbers. As long as WR can match total player hours per team it should all even out. I think that play wise everyone would benefit from greater around the clock map populations enough that that would outweigh imbalances at specific times. Edit: A team can always completely ignore additional maps that get added in which case they miss out on points for objectives held, but nothing more, they aren't at any greater disadvantage on the maps they are on. And nobody cares about points anyway so... (okay, the team with outsized numbers would have access to more sources of supply but that isn't that big of a deal)

According to the wiki page, the contents of large loot bags, which are dropped from enemy players, are worth 56(buy)/64(sell) copper on average based on the drop rates of the content. The TP price at the moment is 3.39(buy)/18.17(sell) silver. Why would anyone pay 18s for something worth less on average than 64c? I've been routinely opening my loot bags without any thought, is there any reason why anyone would open them rather than sell them? They don't list any high value contents like infusions.

One difference balance-wise is that while players can stack an alliance they cannot stack an entire world as players have no control over the other alliances and players that they get grouped with. If we assume 2500 players per world an alliance will make up at most one fifth of the world population so I would expect that stacking will be less of an issue than currently. On the potential upside there is the potential for two alliances with 500 "professionals" each to be facing off against one another which should make for pretty great gaming. It will be interesting to see how things play out and whether 500 gamers can actually be corralled into coherent 500 player alliances.

One or both of you can transfer servers so that you are on the same server, then you will play together until the next beta at least.

The motivation is that the size of the teams is currently heavily influenced by avoiding big queues at peak times, the side effect of which is that the maps are underpopulated at non-peak times, if there was an alternate way to avoid queues at peak times it would allow the maps to be less underpopulated at non-peak times. Another perspective would be as the problem of mismatched populations already exists anyway, perhaps we should just accept it to the extent that we can't improve it with WR efforts. If your team can't viably compete on five maps then why not take advantage of per map limits and choose four on which to be fully competitive. A lot of people don't care about "winning" the points game anyway so why get hung up on the existence of a map that your team can't hold? Take it as a good thing that your team isn't queued but you have enough players to have good gaming on most of the maps. This would be one extreme of the idea, only have one big match and grow and shrink the number of available maps to match the current population. The desired outcome would be that you would never have dead maps and there would always be good action any time you signed on. As you aggregate teams the imbalances between the teams should be reduced and easier for the WR system to balance out. I don't have a clear vision of how one would organize large numbers of maps or movement between them. It seems there is potential for interesting aspects where access to a map was through portals/gates so that you need to take an objective in order to access a map or part of a map. That would make defending that objective more worthwhile and perhaps focus conflict at such objectives. Coordinating team efforts would also become more challenging if you have dozens of maps, although it could potentially be quite interesting with the opportunity for subgroups of the team to take responsibility for specific maps or parts of the maps thus giving guilds and alliances a sort of physical presence/territory. An added bonus is for those who have an interest in fights with specific opponents you would always have access, at least to the ones that aren't on your team. The group you want to fight would never be locked away in a separate match. No more stale matches.

The fact that they aren't using time zone, or more precisely the time of day you have historically played is enough to potentially put you on maps where you are outnumbered as there is nothing to prevent you from being placed on a team where very few of your teammates play during the same times as you. While it isn't truly random, if you sort players by the number of seconds played in a given period of time the overall order will clearly be sorted but the order of adjacent entries may be nearly random as it can depend on the precise times they signed on and off which will have a lot of unpredictability in it.

I'm curious what downsides there would be to having an extra ebg map that appeared after reset and then disappeared after however many hours queues normal last for. Play on the extra map would award points the same as play on the usual ebg does. There might not be time or motivation to upgrade the structures to the same degree but that would apply equally to all three teams. If it were viable to add maps at specific times when queues normally occur then it would be possible to have higher numbers of people on each team without the drawback of larger queues, which would allow for higher map populations the rest of the time, presuming you reduced the number of tiers. Having higher populations on the maps during nonpeak times would make play during those times much more fun.

So if the guild has N slots then the first N members of the guild that set the guild as their WvW guild get into the alliance and the rest won't be able to set the guild as their WvW guild and will have to set some other guild as their WvW guild or they will end up as individuals. The rest of the guild will not be treated as a guild and grouped together. Have I got that right?

I'm just picturing guild drama around who gets a slot and who doesn't and drama when the slotted guild members wipe the non-slotted guild members or vice versa on the battlefield. Or when the slotted and non-slotted members don't want to fight each other to the detriment of one team or the other. Or if both groups were in the same guild discord. I don't know why but I assumed that a guild would get N slots and could have up to N players on the maps at once. If they had players frequently hitting the slot limit then they would ask for more slots. If they weren't utilizing all their slots they might allow them to be moved to a guild that has greater need of them, presuming that the alliance is hitting its size limits. I had pictured that a guild could have different groups of players that played in different time slots. Oh well. I guess if slots are allocated to dedicated wvwers a 500 player alliance will be 500 dedicated players, which will cause contention for map spots all by itself if they aren't spread out in play times.

So the slots allocated to a guild are allocated to individual guild members? And the rest of the guild will be placed on a team independently? And the two parts of the guild could end up on opposing teams? That doesn't sound like it will end well.

It is going to be interesting to see if Anet will get swayed by the lopsided results of this poll.

The TP price is 22s buy/30s sell at the moment, I can't imagine them upgrading the loot to 30s so I'm selling them on the TP for now.

That might well be the easiest way to go.

Today's posts inspired a new variation of this idea. Let people opt into matches made up entirely of individuals who mainly want to do their dailies! Life will be easier for people who just want to get their dailies done (and/or work toward legendary armor?) and the population of the rest of the servers will largely be people who want to ppt/ppk.

Just to clarify, the individuals only aspect merely referred to the distribution of players across worlds, ie it would be exactly like the current beta where individuals who didn't set a wvw guild got distributed among the worlds without any way for the player to influence their placement. All I was proposing was to have an option to get placed in a match that no guilds were placed in. In retrospect my choice of subject line wasn't the best as it gave the impression of there not still being teams. Your proposal is intriguing. I don't understand how players would be placed in instances and/or move between instances in search of their preferred type of content. Can you elaborate on that aspect?

If the goal is to encourage pushes into melee combat over ranged standoffs aren't persistent ranged AOEs the main culprit? Facing a bazillion red circles between me and the enemy, especially with terrain constraints, is usually the biggest disincentive to closing for me. Persistence is an issue because it allows stacking, which results in spike damage. Is there an effective counter to that? It seems like there should be effective ways to clear stacks of persistent AOEs so that their placement needs to be timed to be effective, or a mechanism that prevents excessive overlapping stacks. My typing speed on a phone is too slow to elaborate much further, hopefully you can decipher what I am trying to get at here.

That is what got me thinking about this! One problem with the current beta is that if you place experienced WVW guilds and inexperienced individuals on the same map the guilds can just farm the individuals. Hypothetically, if the numbers just happened to work out, you could have matches consisting entirely of guilds and matches consisting entirely of individuals. For those that like less lopsided matches, the fights might well be more fun and interesting.

Groups that sign up as individuals will, like all individuals, be (largely) randomly distributed among the worlds so they would end up fighting one another. Only very rarely would they all end up in one world, and the larger the group the more likely they will be split up.

One problem would be that with the megaserver setup there can be multiple instances of a given map, so different things can happen in different maps. In one map there could be a successful defense while in another the attackers are successful. Given the player population of GW2 I suspect that there are a great many instances of some maps.

I really don't understand why people bring up PVP when that is on a completely different scale, doesn't have siege, etc. etc. etc.