Population Idea and Tier rewards (pls feel free to poke holes)

[corwin.8356]

Another MMO I used to play (The Secret World) had a 3-way persistent PVP warzone, call Fusang Projects. They controlled population by having a +/- strategy per side and an almost invincible ally that spawned if you were outnumbered heavily.

 

So I figured that sliding map cap sizes might be the solution to some issues with map crowding basically your color would be limited to no more than 10-15 over the lowest color's population. Each map would register this independently so if for example EBG is pop-capped for your faction you could try one of the others. As more players moved to the lowest pop server the caps would raise for the largest. TSW also had an "equal footing" combat buff for being outnumbered, but it kind of sucked.

 

In thinking about Tiers mattering TSW did have a cool effect where while your faction controlled certain objectives for a period of time all allied players got a non-combat buff depending on the value of the objective.. Even PVEers. It's similar to the PIP scaling but with impact for everyone on your server, or alliance as we move that direction. Might be hard to implement with GW2 but was a neat thing to not only bring attention to the game mode but to make the factions try harder. 

 

I'm just thinking out loud here, feel free to tear into it.

 

Panda-Maximus

[Strider Pj.2193]

One of the problems to ‘dynamic map caps’ that trigger to certain population levels, is it incentivizes more….  Competitive people to try push people off the map..

 

Second part is, do people get kicked off of they are on a map that the other team becomes outnumbered?

 

Queues…..  

 

Not opposed to the ‘nearly invincible ally’ the way siege razer used to function and to some small extent still can

 

And, I think…. If alliances brings tiers to more functional competitive levels, they might do something with rewards for this….  Though I still am not sure that is a great idea but I would likely be in the minority..  It just may incentivize some stacking tendencies of off hour groups into their own alliances… 

[Dawdler.8521]

If people complain that restructuring would "ruin" WvW due to worlds going away... hooo boy.... Your suggestion would completely destroy guilds because no one can gather more than 10ish people. Lets say that 30 people in a guild raid want to move to a border. Well, 10 end up on one team, 10 end up another and 10 end up on a third. Fighting each other on random sides. A guild raid. 

And that just repeats worse and worse every time they go to another border since the 10 that ended up one team before can suddenly be spread on all 3 teams, so you cant even take what little you can muster with you.

Really?

If autobalance is *not* in place (ie you stick to your team if that's what you meant for this) then the enemy can literally block you from playing by not playing, so no one can ever raise the stakes for more fights.

Edited January 13, 2022 by Dawdler.8521

[corwin.8356]

3 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

If people complain that restructuring would "ruin" WvW due to worlds going away... hooo boy.... Your suggestion would completely destroy guilds because no one can gather more than 10ish people. Lets say that 30 people in a guild raid want to move to a border. Well, 10 end up on one team, 10 end up another and 10 end up on a third. Fighting each other on random sides. A guild raid. 

I think you misunderstood me. An alliance or guild would never end up opposing each other, They just would have only their max get in. The excess would have to either wait for pop cap balance (by other players on the lowest pop faction moving to that map) or go to other maps (similar to how it works now when we queue out a map) 

 

I hope that clarified it.

[Dawdler.8521]

10 minutes ago, corwin.8356 said:

I think you misunderstood me. An alliance or guild would never end up opposing each other, They just would have only their max get in. The excess would have to either wait for pop cap balance (by other players on the lowest pop faction moving to that map) or go to other maps (similar to how it works now when we queue out a map) 

 

I hope that clarified it.

Which still means that the less people playing WvW, the less people can actually join WvW to play against them. That's just a downward spiral waiting to happen. That would be incredibly bad for WvW on the whole and far worse than what any unbalanced fights could ever do.

Edit oh and that beacon of hope for a new model of WvW... it had 100 players over the last 24h according to Steam. Out of all the things that WvW could take after, taking after a complete failure sounds like a poor idea.

 

Edited January 13, 2022 by Dawdler.8521

[corwin.8356]

21 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Which still means that the less people playing WvW, the less people can actually join WvW to play against them. That's just a downward spiral waiting to happen. That would be incredibly bad for WvW on the whole and far worse than what any unbalanced fights could ever do.

I see your point, although I'm not completely convinced that it couldn't work. Fusang was designed for up to three 150 man teams, Templar, Illuminati, and Dragon (Red, Blue and Green - unsurprisingly) so it's interesting to see if something can be drawn from the alternate model, given the similarities.

Edit: The beacon you're referring to being Secret World Legends? If so that's a rebooted game with all of the IP and none of the good stuff from the original. It's dead because Funcom made it so. Was still an excellent IP and worth a solo story playthrough if nothing else. But yeah, doesn't look good on metrics.

Edited January 13, 2022 by corwin.8356

[Stand The Wall.6987]

i guess it might work if there were multiple instances of the same map that players could queue into. imo this should already be in place so people don't have to wait... seriously one of the dumbest and most pointless things bottle necking wvw. the score for each map could simply be added to a total based on how many maps there are, so if there are 3 maps open each map contributes 33%.

[Xenesis.6389]

Sliding caps have been discussed previously. You don't even mention the minimum required to trigger this effect, but it really help that much with a 10-15 player gap per side. If you're sitting in ebg with 10 people, the other two sides could still have 25 each, more than enough to take anything and everything from the side with 10.

We already have a semi invincible ally in seigerazor, although I feel like him and his event needs to be tweaked, but I honestly don't even remember the last time I've seem him used.

As for objectives giving non combat buffs to even pve players.. I mean we  had https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists and was taken out when skirmish mode came in, and pve players didn't care, not sure we should bother catering anything to them, the only thing they care about is the fastest way for gift of battle and legendary gear.

Any idea to reduce or dynamically mess with map caps, or trying to shove it into instances, kinda diminishes the concept of "World" vs "World" vs "World". I'm still more for trying to balance out the sides while keeping the map caps high as possible, but with game play that's more than just stacking to blob to run around a map.

Which leads to the second point, if anet ever decides to revamp away from a points system, which they most likely won't, they would then have to make objectives more worthwhile to capture and defend, with additional bonuses/rewards attached to them, which could lead to breaking up blob groups into smaller groups. 

Anet once attempted this with the design of the desert map, but creating more chokepoints and more objectives that one person can do, doesn't exactly promote playing with more smaller groups, everything was the same except they made it longer to get from point a to b.

You can lower the map caps down to 20 and you would still see one zerg of 15-20 running around the map. Instead they need to figure out with their objectives gameplay on how to have 60 on a map but needing 3-4 groups of 15 or 20 to run the map instead. There's a few ways to do it, if you check the game play of eso or warhammer online, I'm not going to run through it yet again, anet needs to figure it out, if they ever want to...

Edited January 14, 2022 by Xenesis.6389

[kash.9213]

5 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

I mean we  had https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists and was taken out when skirmish mode came in, and pve players didn't care, not sure we should bother catering anything to them

There should be features that keep all the game modes connected more. People didn't care because they didn't know it was a thing to begin with because the devs hardly thought WvW was a thing. There's no in world announcements or npc chatter about anything going on in the other game modes and people load into WvW as if it was a separate game.