World Restructuring - possible exploit?

[kafka.1657]

What if 500 players in a guild each create alt accounts and form a second 500-player guild.  Odds are the main guild and alt guild would end up in different worlds.

The players then let their alt guild hibernate for a season while playing their main accounts.  At the end of that season, the sleeping alt guild would have a VERY low strength rating in the eyes of ArenaNet's algorithm and would be placed into a relatively strong world in the following season.  At the start of that new season, those 500 players would hop to their alt guild and enjoy an overpowered world while letting their main guild hibernate.

Back and forth they'd go from season to season, each time deceiving the algorithm and getting into a relatively strong world.

Food for thought.

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Edited September 10, 2021 by kafka.1657

[Sviel.7493]

Even if such an absurd edge case happened, it would still be better than what we have now.

[subversiontwo.7501]

Stop giving people ideas Kafka 😄

[God.2708]

They... Can already do this. What you are proposing has been a complaint since day 1.

[Dawdler.8521]

And there is nothing preventing people today from having an account on every world and just jumping wherever.

We dont know how "activity" will be weighted. Your example fails if numbers matter more or calculated guild strength remains over multiple shuffles.

[kafka.1657]

51 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

...Your example fails if numbers matter more or calculated guild strength remains over multiple shuffles.

Certainly the algorithm will be assessing strength on the basis of much more than numbers.

But I hope you are right about performance data being retained across multiple shuffles.  That could help.

Edited September 10, 2021 by kafka.1657

[kafka.1657]

54 minutes ago, God.2708 said:

They... Can already do this. What you are proposing has been a complaint since day 1.

There certainly hasn't been a team-formulating algorithm for players to mess with since day 1.  ...Or are you suggesting that the new system will do little more than the current population assessor does?  Hope not.

Edited September 10, 2021 by kafka.1657

[kafka.1657]

On 9/10/2021 at 3:59 PM, Sviel.7493 said:

Even if such an absurd edge case happened, it would still be better than what we have now.

Absurd, yet elsewhere in this thread I'm told it's been "a complaint since day 1."  Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Regardless of whether ArenaNet will counter this exploit, I do agree that it will still be better than what we have now.

[joneirikb.7506]

The main defence against this is that we don't know how long ANet calculates player activity (and is one of the reasons they don't give us those kind of numbers).

But theoretically, a group of 500 players, could create 6 accounts each, and have them all join into 6 different guilds, and then cycle through them each time there was a new "World Reset". 

In practise however, are you ever going to find 500 active players willing to go through that many hoops to pull of that stunt ? It would also require a good amount of logistics and organisation outside of the game to make that work, which isn't impossible, but humans generally tend to fall off more and more as the amount of organisation is required. 

[kafka.1657]

4 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

The main defence against this is that we don't know how long ANet calculates player activity (and is one of the reasons they don't give us those kind of numbers).

True.  ArenaNet factoring in a very simple, but persistent pips-per-in-game-hour calculation could do much to neutralize this kind of exploit.  Let's hope they're listening.  😉

[Yuffi.2430]

Why would you do this anyway?

Both the alt guild accounts and the "main" guild accounts would only get 50% of the rewards they could get by playing full time. Who would play for half the reward?

There would be no impact on server prestige (there are no servers) and no guarantee of where the two guilds would end up (they could even be on the same side!).

Even the concept of using alt accounts for spying becomes less likely since you would have no guarantee where your alt account would end up unless you manage to sneak an alt into a rival guild... and I bet they would kick you quite quickly.

[Xenesis.6389]

That process would only be worth it depending on the rewards at the end of each season, ultimately that's the only reason for players to want to stack worlds with the best/most players, as players did in the past for stuff like tournaments, and the extra green bags at the end of matches lol.

 

Hopefully they are going to use more factors other than just recent player activity to sort groups of players, such as maybe reading account wxp ranks, and maybe total play time in wvw not just the recent eight weeks, and then as the seasons go along the problem could sort itself out.

 

[kafka.1657]

15 hours ago, Yuffi.2430 said:

Why would you do this anyway?

For the sake of balance, the algorithm will place a relatively weak guild with a somewhat strong team and vice versa.  Therefore, a hibernating guild, appearing to be weak, will be placed with a strong team.  And since, those 500 players are always starting a new season on characters that have been hibernating they will always be placed with a strong team.  And why would you not want to be placed with a team that is always strong?

Sorry if I did not explain that clearly enough in my original post. 

Of course, there's always a ~13% chance of disaster if the main and alt guilds end up on the same team.  😢

Edited September 14, 2021 by kafka.1657

[joneirikb.7506]

If they actually went through all that silly trouble that I mentioned with 6 alt characters/guilds, they'd be near guaranteed that at least one of them is some place they'd like.

But yeah for the reasons: Some people just want to roflstomp the enemy, and want to stack multiple good teams to completely negate any difficulty/challenge. Nope it isn't healthy for the game mode, but these kind of players doesn't care.