Raymond Lukes.6305
-
Posts
124 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Forums
Blogs
Events
Articles
Downloads
Gallery
Store
Posts posted by Raymond Lukes.6305
-
-
@"Sojourner.4621" said:
There have been some concerns about how World Restructuring will change the ways people are matched in public maps outside of WvW. In a previous post, I alluded to the possibility of an issue here but I was mistaken. At the time, I wasn't clear about public map instance selection and how it was done. I've now done the proper discovery and nothing about how we are changing worlds with world restructuring will effect instance selection for public maps.
-
@"Thorfinnr Sleggja.1209" said:If I am repping my "friends guild" and playing PvE to get guild favor for bounties or whatever, but then decide to jump into WvW for a bit: Will I get sorted as a "solo" player because I am repping my "PvX" guild(not set as WvW guild) of my friends or will it place me in with the "HoD Alliance" appropriately if I have that tagged as my WvW Guild?Repping a guild and selecting a WvW guild are independent.Also, if I do have an "HoD Alliance" guild set as my WvW guild, will there be a way for our small guild to go into WvW together when we need to do a WvW guild mission?So long as your guild mates are sorted into your world you'll be able to do your WvW missions for that guild.I guess basically I am asking will the guild we are set to "Represent" affect how we are sorted, or will that default "WvW" tag always apply in our sorting?It's only the WvW guild that applies to sorting.
-
@Phelar.1627 said:Can we please get some type of title of the the world were on currently when this changes. I've been on the same server since Early access and would like to have something to represent that.
We are still finalizing things but we are looking at giving titles. How it will work I'm still not clear on but we want to do something that acknowledges people's worlds.
-
@FrizzFreston.5290 said:Also would like to know if the system still is set out to ask for guild to be set as a wvw guildYes you will still declare a guild as your WvW guild.
-
@X T D.6458 said:
@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:@X T D.6458 said:Do we still need to mark a guild/alliance to stay on the same world?Yes, this hasn't changed.Will there still be a cap to how many guilds can be in an alliances, if so what is it?see aboveMaybe I am missing something, but I see the post referring to the size of guilds but not the number of guilds per alliance.Sorry it's not really called out specifically but its here. Basically if we do some kind of round up method that will limit the number of guilds to what ever the 500 / Minimum guild size (so like if a 1 person guild is rounded up to 5 then there would be a limit of 100 guilds). If we don't round up guild limit would be 500 at one person per guild.
Minimum Guild Size
The original plan was to count a guild within the alliance at some rounded-up size rather than exact size when calculating how full an alliance was. The benefit of this method was it would give more autonomy to the individual guilds to control WvW members, i.e., recruit new members or if current guild members decide they want to start playing WvW.
-
Thanks for the update! I'd humbly suggest working on the front-end for alliances and implementing them ahead of time before the matchmaking gets in place, so that it allows us to learn that system (and debug it) before it can impact the world-building. If that's at all possible.Alliance chat might be paramount, so i'd personally like to see that implemented prior to the release of the system.
We fully intend to give a significant lead time with the frontend in place and people able to setup WvW guilds and alliances before the matchmaker does it's thing for the first time.
-
@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:
I ask, because I'm a pretty casual WvW player, honestly, and I'm currently on a T1 world. Everyone else at that level is way more serious than I ever expect to be, so I'm a bit of both an easy target, and inclined to feel like a bit of a hinderance -- even if I play competently with the groups, I'm likely to make unwise decisions because I just don't have the same commitment they do.
Ideally you can find a guild that has a similar play style and approach to WvW that you do and join them. That way you have a group that plays like you'd like.
-
@X T D.6458 said:If an alliance has a cap of 500 players, will there be a cap to how many alliances can be in a world?I talk a little about this in the post above but we're not sure what we want to do here. There are pros and cons to both methods and we're still weighing those options.What will be the total world population cap?World population caps will be a function of how many tiers we have. Ideally the population will be spread evenly between N teams.How will transferring work since populations will be reshuffled every 2 months, the current system will need to be changed.Transferring is detailed in the original post.Do we still need to mark a guild/alliance to stay on the same world?Yes, this hasn't changed.Will there still be a cap to how many guilds can be in an alliances, if so what is it?see aboveWill there be changes to guilds to allow more flexibility for players? Increasing the number of guild slots so people can join a guild specifically for WvW and mark it for example.We are looking into a variety of ways to help make the system launch smoothly. I don't have details on any of these things as we are still looking into the what things we are going to pursue.
-
@SineDen.3514 said:
@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:Yes WvW play timeA total play time or rather the last week play time?The play time calculation will take into consideration the historic play time of the play. I'm not going to go into details on how that calculation is done.
-
@"ImperialWL.7138" said:When you say "player hours" am I right in assuming this is strictly WvW playtime and not overall account playtime? It may seem obvious but you didn't clarify it. Just want to make sure that it is actually WvW playtime.
Yes WvW play time
-
July 2018 Update
I have been meaning to give everyone a World Restructuring update for a while now and I finally have a bit of down time to spend doing just that. Back in January, we posted a tentative design that would balance world populations and allow for continued balancing as time goes on. Since that post, we have reviewed a lot of community feedback in many forms (Gw2 Official Forum discussions, Reddit, in game interactions, etc.) and have started moving forward with that system. As we stated in the original document, this large task requires work from multiple disciplines and is going to take some time to fully complete. Add to that live game support and, as you can guess, our task lists are full.
When?
At this time, we do not have a date to share with the community but we are actively working toward internal milestones. We plan to post periodic updates when we have interesting or relevant information to share.
Where are they now?
We currently have in place some of the backend systems that will track, store, and handle changes to the alliance structure of guilds. The current iteration does not include front-end systems or UI for creating, joining, or otherwise dealing with alliances. However, it gives us some structure and the ability to start field-testing how alliances/WvW guilds would look. From here, we can run simulations and get a sense for how the system might function under load.
What is next?
The next major things to develop are the front-end systems and the back-end matchmaking. The front-end takes time and iteration, and the matchmaking itself is sort of the whole point and needs to be undertaken with care, since it involves assigning every WvW player to a new world all at once!
Why is this taking so long?
This project is not small in scale. As we said when we began, we are changing and adding a bunch of major systems with this change. We are moving along at a pace that tracks with our goals but, as is the nature of our jobs, things can come up involving either unforeseen complications with the World Restructuring system or issues with the live game that need to be addressed first.
Updates, Clarifications and FAQ
What makes up a world?
We will build a world from any number of Alliances, Guilds, and Solo Players. This means a single alliance will not necessarily dominate the population of a world. The goal is to create even worlds, so the matchmaker builds the worlds out of whatever pieces makes sense to fulfill that goal.
Will you build hard-core and casual worlds?
No. The goal is to balance worlds by population. The matchmaker, at this time, is unconcerned with trying to match skill.
Alliance size
We are currently leaning toward alliance size being 500. This is technically easier, as we already support groups of this size (guilds), and it gives us more flexibility to make the worlds even.
Minimum Guild Size
The original plan was to count a guild within the alliance at some rounded-up size rather than exact size when calculating how full an alliance was. The benefit of this method was it would give more autonomy to the individual guilds to control WvW members, i.e., recruit new members or if current guild members decide they want to start playing WvW.
Rewards/Tournaments/Leaderboards
If—and that is a big if—we do add/change rewards to be tied more directly to World success in matches, those changes would come later. The plan is to ship the core system and get all the kinks worked out and the teams balanced before we start trying to find new ways to give rewards or do tournaments or anything of that kind.
Player Play Hours
In the original post and discussion, we talked about using player hours (the current method we use for calculating world sizes for links and “full” status) and then adjusting those hours by other metrics like command hours, etc. We subsequently have decided to, at least at the start, use only play hours and not adjust using other metrics. This will allow us to compare apples to apples so to speak once the system is in place. From there we can simulate how certain adjustments would change the matchups. This will make it easier to determine if an adjustment will have a positive impact.
Alliance Tags on the Name Plate
As of right now, changes to the nameplate that add an Alliance Tag is in the “Would Like to Have” column.
How is the alliance system going to affect queues?
It depends on where you normally play. If you are used to playing on a large world then I imagine the queue times will seem better. If you are used to playing on a smaller world then the queue times may seem to increase somewhat. This also is dependent on how big we let the worlds get. We can potentially adjust the number of worlds to help with this.
Alliance Chat
This is something we have on our list. With the exception of a technical limitation that prevents us from doing it this, we believe it should be something that gets in eventually.
-
@Discomfort.5987 said:I absolutely love this idea. High population on certain servers needs to be addressed and I think getting rid of servers and having different worlds based off of players playtime/rank/time of day play, is very important to finally get balance in WvW.
I have a few questions and concerns.
- Max # of alliances per world. I understand some alliances might have max number of players, but in the case of some alliances being low population (let's say 100 wvw'ers as opposed to one with 500 wvw'ers). Will there be extra alliances per world? Or will you compensate with extra random guilds?There won't be a hard limit to the number of Alliances on a world. The limits will fall out of the match maker keeping everything balanced. We're going to try various things to get the worlds balanced and make the matches more even across the board
- Trying to sort people into worlds based off what time of day they play will be very difficult, is this something you all are looking into? and if so, how will you count a player that plays multiple time zones?Agreed and that's why we might not even do it. We need to take a detailed look at the data and see if it's even possible to meaningfully spread out off hour populations without making the game less fun for those people. This is something that we'll be looking at a lot while developing the system.
-
@Threather.9354 said:
@brianmiguel.8517 said:So will guilds need to kick inactive members in order to not take up alliance slots?The members need to mark one of their current guilds as WvW guild every 2 months to get counted towards alliance slot for that particular matching. Members that dont mark the guild as the one they chose to go with to a new world, dont count.There is no plan to make this an active thing you need to keep setting. Once it's set you wont have to set it again unless something happens to unset it (you leave the guild etc).
-
@shiri.4257 said:
@brianmiguel.8517 said:So will guilds need to kick inactive members in order to not take up alliance slots?If they're designated as the WvW guild, probably so. Guild Administration should be up to the guild not anet anyways. However, if they're not designated it shouldn't have an affect.I can look into adding the ability for guild administration to modify declaration status of members either by changing permissions of the member or a direct modification.
-
@Klypto.1703 said:
@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:@hmsgoddess.3869 said:I'd like to make a suggestion in regards to alliances and number cap. As a guild leader I am in charge of making alliances that benefits my guild, that said this means I need to know how many of my guild members are choosing my guild as their WvW guild, as you can imagine one larger guilds this is a guild leader nightmare. I need to know how many are choosing my guild as their WvW guild. When the time comes, I do hope that ANET places some sort of UI that guild leaders can see as to whom is selecting their guild as the WvW guild choice. A simple 50/100 have selected this guild for WvW is fine it would at least give guild leaders a base number to foster alliances with. Just my 2 cents.There will be UI to help manage the guild aspects of this change so you'll defiantly be able to see guild members that have picked your guild as their WvW guild.One issue regarding guilds and this may or may not happen with restructuring but a certain server I am on they basically are toxic to anything except afking inside smc waiting for someone to attack it. That problem being said some of us smaller guilds had to make alt guilds just to have enough claims if this issue persists in the restructuring will we be able to claim objectives outside of the wvw guild we choose? thxyes, there is currently no plan to change the way claiming works.
-
@hmsgoddess.3869 said:I'd like to make a suggestion in regards to alliances and number cap. As a guild leader I am in charge of making alliances that benefits my guild, that said this means I need to know how many of my guild members are choosing my guild as their WvW guild, as you can imagine one larger guilds this is a guild leader nightmare. I need to know how many are choosing my guild as their WvW guild. When the time comes, I do hope that ANET places some sort of UI that guild leaders can see as to whom is selecting their guild as the WvW guild choice. A simple 50/100 have selected this guild for WvW is fine it would at least give guild leaders a base number to foster alliances with. Just my 2 cents.
There will be UI to help manage the guild aspects of this change so you'll defiantly be able to see guild members that have picked your guild as their WvW guild.
-
@Dayra.7405 said:
@McKenna Berdrow.2759 said:@NeroBoron.7285 said:Btw: What will happen with eotm? Will it be removed and integrated as a normal map?EotM will remain the same as it does now.Hm, what if someone only plays EotM? If I got it right this results in 0h WvW participation, which lead to this person is not added to any world. But if you are not in a world, you don't have a color. So you have to pick a WvW-World to play EotM?You would still get a world so you would correctly be assigned a color. If all you played was EofM you'd still be registered with the match maker and still get put on a world though your adjusted play hours would not really affect the population value of the world you were assigned.
-
@"ScribeTheMad.7614" said:Which leaves me with a quandary, I and a bunch of current guildies have been working on coordinating a server transfer to group up for WvW.Doing so would leave me on Crystal Desert, but it sounds like I'll need to transfer to SoR to be on my "home" server when Ragnarok happens and titles (whatever they end up being) are handed out. (I would really hate to get the title for the wrong server, honestly)There will be lead time before the worlds get removed. I can't promise we'll be able to do anything but take the world you were on when we made the switch but it's something I can think about.
-
@EbonFreeman.4051 said:Would it be possible to minimize the use of age for the algorithm? The reason why I bring it up is because you can get amazing pairs because of an accounts lack of data (pushing them to a veteran pairing) and also there are veteran players who have tens of thousands of hours and haven't really learned WvW.All aspects of the adjusted play hours are up for discussion. We're going to do a fair bit of data crunching with different calculations and see what shakes out.
-
@FrizzFreston.5290 said:There's still the question as to why a guild would need a switch to be set as WvWguild or activate the possibility to be repped for WvW.This puts the option of how the guild works into the hands of the people managing the guild. This also could be used for future features where a guild needs to be identified as a WvW guild. I'll add this to the list of things to discuss and think about though.
-
@MaLeVoLenT.8129 said:
@Cyczer.7834 said:@Dawdler.8521 said:@Cyczer.7834 said:You just have to join them and choose them as your wvw guild and you can keep playing with your friends.Did Anet say youhave to?Guilds is only for sorting players on the world. In the extreme example of someone having 0 guilds joining WvW, I'm assuming he will just join a random world thats not full, for the duration of being logged on. Another random world the next time he logs etc. Alternativly setting that random world as the home world until reset.At least that would be the logical method.Thats exactly what it is, you have to join guilds if you dont wanna rely on your luck to being put in same server. Otherwise you'll be placed randomly.Its not by random. Its based off you contacts and what guilds you are in. who you party with. So if you choose to not have any guild claimed as your WvW guild, it will STILL take into account what guilds you're in when it places you. Furthermore Arena Net has alluded to the fact, that it is still able for such an individual to Transfer during the 8 week Season so you are indeed never trapped.This is not totally correct. When suggesting a world to a player that hasn't been assigned one (new player, one returning after a long time away from the game, etc) we will present the player with a few worlds to choose from. We'd like this to consider friends, guilds, etc when picking the worlds to suggest but these same considerations are not planned when the server build worlds with the players, guilds and alliances known to the system.
-
@glass.3245 said:
@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:@"Tolmos.8395" said:I would like to reiterate the previous questions posed, and not yet answered, about how this will affect Roleplayers.This is something we hadn’t fully considered and we’ll start looking into possible solutions.It would be nice if you roleplayers could enter WvW in "guest mode" and be seen as NPCs by the other players. More than once I've gone into a group full burst before noticing say chat and trying to disengage. The tone of frustration suggested that this was pretty common.This goes beyond players in WvW. World is used as one of the considerations when picking what instances of a map someone will go on. Removing the ability for the RP community to pick a single world reduces the chance for them to matched in a map instance with each other in the game at large without already being in the same guild or in a squad. We'd like to find a way to fix this if we can. -
@Zephyr.8015 said:
@"Raymond Lukes.6305" said:There has been some talk about using Blackgate as an example in the post. Blackgate has been at the top of player activity hours in WvW for a very long time in NA. BG's numbers are twice as big as the average world on NA (without world linking) and 30% larger then the average NA host world. I'm not saying Blackgate hasn't suffered losses of players and coverage but BG is still on top for activity. IT'S NOT JUST BLACKGATE though.Here are all the worlds in NA and EU ordered by size names have been omitted to protect the innocent:So you're are saying that BG has the most WvW hours played, you are not saying that BG has the most players. Played hours does NOT equal population. It is unfair to say that in general. Like tonight we have scouts, commanders, and players in general that spend hours or most of their day in WvW. BG players have stated numerous times that we have dedicated players and guilds who care about our standing in WvW. I'd love to see a statistic for average played hours per person/per server in WvW.You are correct play hours is not the same as unique player population. We have found that it more accurately represents the ability of a world to "hold it's own" in WvW. That being said your position on that chart does not change compared to the other NA servers if we use unique player population.
-
@Eramonster.2718 said:Will it still be a three sided war?YesDo we need to join the guild/just declare associated with the particular guild/server?YesRewards that is good enough make players raise their blades against same server/friendly guilds but under different alliance?For the initial pass the goal is to get the new structure in place and from there we can look into extending this further. This could include a look into rewards but that is a ways down the line.Will the alliance continue every matchup?Alliances will remain after a matchup but new worlds will be created each time. Alliances are not the same as worlds.
World Restructuring Update 2
in World vs. World
Posted
Hey everyone,I would like to give you all a quick update about world restructuring. It has been a few months since our last update, and we are happy to let you know that progress has been good. We have overcome a few major snags and bugs and this has put a few of our big goals in sight.
What am I working on?
I am primarily working on World Restructuring with some of my time supporting the live game. These additional tasks include improvements for some live systems, addressing bugs and a bit of internal support for the team. I have worked on some QoL tasks such as removing participation decay outside of WvW. I hope that we soon will be able to announce some of the other things we have been working on. As I have discussed before, we are working on a live game, and so there are always a lot of moving parts.
What has been happening with World Restructuring?
We spent some time since the July update working on breaking down the remaining backend tasks. I have been focusing on getting those things done. Presently, many of the pieces are working on their own, though some things are still outstanding. Once I have all the parts I will begin the work of stitching it all together. I want to stress that while there has been a lot of work done, and we have made some really good and exciting progress, we are still a ways out from the launch of World Restructuring and Alliances.
One of the elements that currently is functional on the backend is the concept of WvW guilds and players being able to select a WvW guild. We test this using debug commands because none of the UI is in place, but the communication layers are there as well as the storage aspects of that data. This provides us with some of the data necessary for grouping people onto teams in the matchmaker.
Speaking of the matchmaker, I have completed a very basic implementation of a matchmaker that will churn through a huge list of players grouped by WvW guild and then place them on teams while keeping team sizes even. There is still a lot to do with this to get it to something that handles all the cases we want, but the early work and numbers look very promising.
We are taking a pragmatic approach to building and testing various parts of World Restructuring. We are already testing some of these systems in isolation using live data and the live environment. Using this method, we have already identified bugs and race conditions that would have been difficult to track down and fix with the whole system in place.
There has not been a ton of work on the player front end. We continue to focus on getting the core architecture solid so we can build the frontend on a working foundation. Once work is underway and we have something more tangible on the frontend, we can start discussing how we want to show off the new shinies to everyone.
F.A.Q.
What World Restructuring update would be complete without an FAQ section?
Is there an update on the Alliance (World Restructuring) system?Yes, here it is! ;)
Can NA and EU players join the same Alliance and play WvW together?No. The NA and EU still will be split and have their own teams. While it technically will be possible for a guild or alliance to have members in both NA and EU, the system places those players on teams in their own datacenter.
Will I need to buy an Expansion to get into an alliance?No.
What about non-WvW groups that use their shard to influence map instance selection outside of WvW?These players will be unaffected by this change. The system that chooses map instances does not consider shard.
How does the alliance system fix anything if people still will be able to transfer?Currently, the plan is to change where we allow people to transfer, and to be more responsive to transfer restrictions for teams that are overpopulated. Some of the details of how this will work are in the original post about World Restructuring.
Will time zone imbalance still be an issueIt is true that in the initial release of World Restructuring we are not planning to consider time zone distribution when creating worlds. Part of that is so we can get the primary aspects of the system in and gather data about how the system works given the metrics we are using for balance. We want to compare apples to apples to give us the clearest information. This also will allow us to have a new baseline to compare against modifications to the metrics used for balancing the teams. We also are discussing some other ways to address “off hours” play, so stay tuned for more info as we can share it.
Are only WvW play hours, not all play hours, considered in the population calculation?Yes, we only use play hours in WvW when doing the population calculations.
How Many Alliances can be on a team?There is not a clear answer here other than “however many there need to be.” The focus is on getting the population balanced and not specifically on limiting the number of alliances per team.
Are you planning to update the API?Yes. There will need to be some updates to the API to support the new system. Beyond that, I do not have details.
Is repping a guild the same as selecting it as my WvW guild?No, repping is independent from selecting your WvW guild. You still will be able to rep whatever guild you like in WvW without changing the world the system places you on.
What is next? What comes after World Restructuring?Whoa now! We should not get ahead of ourselves. World Restructuring is only one of the irons we have in the fire so we are talking about things post World Restructuring. These are things we are not ready or able to discuss yet but we’ll update you when we have more things to relay.