Discuss successful alliance-era roaming

[Grand Marshal.4098]

58 minutes ago, Caedmon.6798 said:

10 - 12 people considered roaming now. ? Roaming is 1 - 5. Anything above is havoc or gank,anything above that is a blob or zoneblob.

I don't disagree, but there is legit no place you can find that without it escalating immediately. 1 offensive is all that's needed for a potential Map chat call and boom 20 appear, especially if it's some T3 NC...

 

EB another bag of worms and Desert...probs the most roamer-friendly environment in that it's big with lot's of kiting spots and you can easily tell enemy zerg movement. Otherwise too big distance to meaningfully respond quickly.

[subversiontwo.7501]

On 1/21/2022 at 7:46 PM, Moradorin.6217 said:

People often missunderstand roaming and what role it actually filled before Feb 2020. I used to commonly roam around desert /.../ I used to take Fire and Air keep and anything else even a garrison a few times when undefended.

Roaming

I would be inclined to agree with what you said before this qoute. The definitions of these things are not super exclusive. We do all kinds of things and that is what makes WvW both fun and makes it WvW.

However, the definitions are based on what you do and not on what you are. That is why I would argue that you are among the people who misunderstand the definition. Then one could ask whether words matter, but for me words do matter as there are other words to describe other actions.

You can flip it around and look at a public pickup squad player (pug). There are plenty of situations where they are separated from their tag and will take objectives running back or engage in roaming smaller-scale content. That does not turn them into roamers. So while the definition is a description of what you do, it refers to what you primarily aim to do. Based on your example above I wouldn't call you a roamer. You made it sound like the primary thing you did was take (undefended-) objectives and the definition of that is PPT. It involves concern for matchup score (points) and objectives (per tick). It is a description of what you do and primarily concern yourself with. It is important to define because the older and more tightly defined definition of roaming generally does not concern itself with matchup score, when roaming or in general.

 

World Restructuring

That's also important for the ever-looming topic of World Restructuring because it is only once you start to concern yourself with matchup score that issues and disagreement seem to appear. Many of those issues include that people were never meant to take undefended objectives, to leverage coverage- and population advantages to the degree that has been allowed this far. Once you start assuming things naturally being defended and fought over (closing the gap between PPT and PPK) the order of relationship between PPT and PPK (or between casual solo players and organised group players relative score) becomes all the more appearant. Now, people like me argue that the order of things is the same regardless of system. However, the existing system makes that hard to see by using the coverage- and population imbalances to make certain players disproportionately impactful or make them feel more impactful than they really are. The issue is: That perspective relies upon the imbalances and what is broken in the system(s).

 

Roaming + World Restructuring

So by and large, roaming is affected very little by World Restructuring. PPT is affected to a great deal by World Restructuring, but it is the very purposes of World Restructuring to change and balance that. PPT is heavily inflated by things that should not exist as the original system was designed. It wasn't designed with coverage- and population imbalances in mind. The restructuring seeks to rebalance that and with that it will restore how impactful players are given their choices. It seems to be mostly that which certain players are concerned with because they are used to being dispropotionately impactful in the greater relationship of various things that you can do in WvW (roam, raid, pug, havoc, defend, etc.). You see the same issue in your example of DBL. Some people see other players' dislike of DBL as good, as a grace away from those players.

However, from a systems perspective that is very bad for WvW because you have one map not being balanced to the other maps while they make up a total of score. It goes against the design principles and it detracts from the interaction between all these things that you can do (that are represented by descriptions and definitions). There were never meant to be safe haven maps or times for roaming, PPT or anything else. Things were meant to coexist and be balanced on all maps so their relative impact is ordered in an eco-system. That order exists even if the imbalances hides it a little bit. Players who can avoid other players are disproportionately impactful on score but they are at the same time more dependent on the players who engage other players than vice versa and the more balanced populations are, the less impactful PPT without PPK becomes and the more appearant this relationship is whether we talk about climbing the ladder to where everyone has coverage or population-balance systems design.

 

Alliances + World Restructuring

This finally ties into the whole guilds and alliances discussion, because I see guilds as possible to form or as being formed for anything people like to do when they establish more permanent bonds. That is a good thing. There are roaming guilds, there are defending PPT guilds and so on. When they organise like that they become stronger and they become more prone to create content and share content. When the alliance function comes we do not yet know where things will end up, but I believe that things will gradually become more diverse as time goes on.

There are easily cases to make for a small guild of more defensive PPT-minded players who look to be competent at what they do to be appealing for an alliance of guilds. Nothing in World Restructuring or Alliances itself changes the impact of PPT or the value of coverage, it only really deals with population imbalance from a volume perspective and a gem-transfer perspective. It only brings the pieces used to balance worlds from 2500 to 1-500 players (or the total pieces from 2 to 5+ per world).

The reason we can't have 2500-sized pieces anymore is that everyone can not have a 2500 piece or that we will never agree on whose 2500-or-less server should be allowed to stay if they take some away. The new system is just more granular, easier to balance and involves everyone rather than choosing who stays or goes. The most glaring example is that the people who argue for eg., tier removals never want to sacrifice their own server, regardless of its size or place on the ladder. I've not seen any example to the contrary yet, which means they do not argue for the system, they argue for selfish reasons that take no resposibility for the system. If we adopted their choice they would just start fighting with each other instead. Large servers would argue small servers should go and small servers would argue the casual friendship of their community. We wouldn't get past the issue of large and small servers being incapable of balanced matchups or that size would beat performance to keep the matchup ladder from doing its job.

 

Words and discussions

I know this is getting very long but I don't think it matters if I write 5 posts or 5 headers: I want to touch upon what @Caedmon.6798 said above there too. He is applying words like gank or havoc into some sort of idea of increasing group sizes. However words mean something. Gank (or gang-killing) in its broadest term is just using superior numbers to attack inferior numbers and its original meaning is just using a group to bully solo players (a gang killing solo players). Havoc is about causing havoc, its a description of an action and not a size. It comes in two flavours PPT Havoc and PPK Havoc. Both of the definitions assumes breaking a larger group into multiple smaller groups to cause havoc. It means hitting additional objectives while your main group preoccupies opponents or hitting the opponents' main group on a battlefield with additional groups while they are focused on your main group, to cause havoc among their ranks.

I'm being a bit adamant about these things because complex discussions just becomes all the more difficult if people do not understand the words used to talk about them. It is incredibly difficult to talk about World Restructuring if people don't understand what roaming or pugging means or just attribute their own definitions of these things that already have words to describe the meaning. It ends up in situations where we say the same things but mean different things and that is not good for a healthy discussion of World Restructuring or roaming's place in content.

Similarily, you wouldn't be able to talk about Thief balance in roaming if you think ganking refers to a group larger than a party or if you assume roaming primarily assumes defending static objectives (which is the opposite of what the word roaming implies: to wander aimless or spontaneous). Objective defense for score is neither wandering, aimless or spontaneous while crossing a map and engaging whatever else is wandering about is all those things. It is an accurate description of roaming, the word.

 

This thread and all of this

If you understand what roaming and pugging means you also understand that roaming is largely unaffected by World Restructuring while pugging is divisive in World Restructuring between the people who create public groups and the people who want to join public groups. I've said it before, World Restructuring is motivated more by the commander-follower relationship than it is by the guild-player relationship. Whereas regardless of system, the guild-player and server-community relationship is dominated by guild-born players and that becomes more appearant the more balanced populations are. The less balanced populations are the harder this is to see but it is no less the order.

All these different words and discussions wrapped up in one is also what makes my post long. However, now that we've done all this we can easily answer the question posed in this thread in several ways: If you roam in strict sense World Restructuring will change little to nothing for you. The 1-5 players you normally play with can easily be put into a guild of 500. If you are more interested in PPT (scouting, defending etc.), you can easily make guild with likeminded friends and then do what you do well enough to appeal to a larger alliance (of guilds from your server). The more size-effective you are, the more appealing and easier to house you will be. There is a misconception that alliances is all about big guilds. It isn't, the smaller you are the easier you fit into guilds as players or alliances as guilds.

Edited January 23, 2022 by subversiontwo.7501