Punching bag teams

[Lord Meowalot.3690]

For this round of beta I decided not to select a wvw guild and instead go with a pvx guild of friends. During reset my experience was:

Enemy sides: fight guilds blobbing together and steamrolling everything, having selected an alliance guild to stay together.

Our side: Black sheep guilds (I recognized several that you might classify as "casual yet toxic") running closed tags with a lot of pugs and new players getting mowed down.

 

My alts on which I did not select any guild actually faired better. I guess if you are solo, then it's easier for you to get a spot in one of the stacked teams. Whereas in smaller guilds, there is limited room and the overflow gets consolidated into a new team: the punching bag team lol.

 

I know there are issues again with people not being placed together but this is not a great new player experience. When this gets rolled out, the experienced guilds will try to stack together as much as possible. People who forget to select their guild will now remember to do so and the bugs placing people together will be fixed. This may mean that punching bag teams become even more of a punching bag.

 

 

 

[enkidu.5937]

Not expecting anything else. The Devs try to replace WvW with the success story of EotM. A place that for a decade now is known for its balanced competition, teamplay and community goals. 😏

[floppypuppy.5789]

I guess it depends on the player mindset, either:

1. Don't do anything and take what you get (and complain alot if don't like)
2. Do something to get yourself on a better team

Maybe the real solution is to develop the handholding for option 2 a bit more.

[Chaba.5410]

Is this one of those "my team/their team" memes? Or just players who got too comfortable getting carried by their Full server with Very High bandwagoned link?

Edited August 13, 2022 by Chaba.5410

[Labjax.2465]

So far my experience as a pug, was:

- Join team pretty arbitrarily (but get to feel like I'm choosing, even tho I lack any real information about what I'm getting into)

- Wait in like 45 people queue for EBG when not even prime time

- Finally get in, my team (green) is dominating blue without even having a tag, blue keeps coming from their keep to EBG and then we obliterate them

- I get intensely bored and realize there is nothing interesting happening here

- I try another map, hoping for a tag, something happening that is more than easily beating back the same enemy over and over

- Find one on green BL, get to them to find they are a rag tag group of like 6-7 people roaming around beating up any 1-3 people who are trying to take any objective

- Realize I want no part of that kind of play and find it intensely boring anyway

- Have a glimmer of hope because tag says they are going to another BL (maybe there will be something interesting now)

- They drop some food, wait a bit, link wp for other BL, I port over along with a few others, they don't show up

- I leave WvW and have no desire to come back for more of this beta

So I guess I got to be against one of the punching bag teams, but for me, it was very boring that way and I just felt like a jerk taking part in it. Ngl, when it told me to pick a team, it showed 3 who were currently skirmishing and I could see who was currently winning of those 3 (had no information about the other teams in the list beyond those 3)... so I joined the team that was currently winning in my view. Did not think it would result in joining a steamroll environment though. Just kinda thought like... why would I purposefully choose a team that's losing? Doing so probably would have put me on a punching bag team I'm guessing, based on what I saw of the opposition. I don't understand why it even let me see that in the first place. Wouldn't it make more sense to hide the current skirmish until you choose? I wonder if that was even intended. Or were they trying to save pugs from the kind of experience you outlined, OP? Don't really understand the goal there.

[misterman.1530]

5 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

...

So I guess I got to be against one of the punching bag teams...

 

Yup. It seems I'm on one of those punching bag teams. Boring at our end too. I mean, it seems the teams punching us like to PVE everything, because we rarely engage right now. I mean, they must have had a map queue on our Garri and had 10 people max. /shrug. I was, ironically, looking forward to the beta.

[Labjax.2465]

3 minutes ago, misterman.1530 said:

Yup. It seems I'm on one of those punching bag teams. Boring at our end too. I mean, it seems the teams punching us like to PVE everything, because we rarely engage right now. I mean, they must have had a map queue on our Garri and had 10 people max. /shrug. I was, ironically, looking forward to the beta.

Sorry to hear that. 😞

[Ronin.4501]

Do try to remember that this beta is NOT for the players and not about giving us a glimpse of what Alliances will be like, but rather it is for Anet trying to work out some of the kinks with the Alliance system. I'm sorry if you got stuck with a crappy server/shard for the week (which is why Anet gave us the buff this week to encourage us all the come out and test the system), and if it makes you feel better a lot of us are frustrated with the high queues and the fact that almost every guild/alliance this week is running tagless making it a bit of a kitten-show as far as player coordination, but again this is so Anet can test what's working and what isn't on their end.

[yourexcellency.1458]

6 hours ago, Ronin.4501 said:

Do try to remember that this beta is NOT for the players and not about giving us a glimpse of what Alliances will be like, but rather it is for Anet trying to work out some of the kinks with the Alliance system. 

How exactly is this not some sort of preview for how alliances will ultimately work? The fight guilds will stack together and if you're not in one you'll end up on team punching bag. Period.  A roamer or small pvx guild that can't(or doesn't want to)get in an alliance or with one of the fight guilds will have no control over where they end up.  I've dealt with some pretty rough match ups in the past but takes the cake.  Anet can keep their meager wvw xp buff it's not worth the frustration.

[misterman.1530]

20 minutes ago, yourexcellency.1458 said:

How exactly is this not some sort of preview for how alliances will ultimately work? The fight guilds will stack together and if you're not in one you'll end up on team punching bag. Period.  A roamer or small pvx guild that can't(or doesn't want to)get in an alliance or with one of the fight guilds will have no control over where they end up.  I've dealt with some pretty rough match ups in the past but takes the cake.  Anet can keep their meager wvw xp buff it's not worth the frustration.

Yup. That's how I feel. This will NOT be conducive to getting new players into the mode. It will be frustrating. For veteran players, it will be more disorganized than usual.

Spend the time, effort, and money into better rewards for WvW, and some quality of life changes.

 

[Demonhead.7584]

Punching bag is right.. https://imgur.com/a/hd1S1XZ

Yes - these KDRs are nothing new. Mag and BG used to pull these all the time (if not higher). But you're talking about a 0.59 KDR vs a 1.54 KDR. It's really unfun and honestly just off-putting. If this is a sign for the WvW environment to come, I guess it's time to put my roaming/wvw hat up for good. It will be a shame, considering I really did enjoy roaming all these years.

We literally spend a good 75% of reset stuck in our own third and/or at spawn because the other two alliances seem to have multiple guilds stacked up around the clock. Roaming is a joke too; it's constantly a 1v3, 1v5.

Edited August 14, 2022 by Demonhead.7584

[Junkpile.7439]

Balance is bad. It's sunday and matches are already over. There is some problem. They know how much every player have played last year, month and so on. How many player he have killed, how many objectives defended. Still some teams have all players who afk in spawn and other team have all tryhards.

[Dawdler.8521]

44 minutes ago, Junkpile.7439 said:

Balance is bad. It's sunday and matches are already over. There is some problem. They know how much every player have played last year, month and so on. How many player he have killed, how many objectives defended. Still some teams have all players who afk in spawn and other team have all tryhards.

Out of the 4 NA tiers, only 1 matchup is a blow out. The other 3 are fairly balanced. 
Out of the 5 EU tiers, 2 of the matchups have one team about 50% up on the lowest, which is a significant score difference. 1 is lower than that and the remaining 2 are decently even. Sounds like the average link shuffle.

What people seem to forget is this simple fact:

THERE ARE NO TEAM RANKINGS IN THE TIERS, EVERYTHING IS COMPTLETELY  RANDOM.

Meaning we can have matchups that are the eqvivalent of T1 teams vs T5 teams. Because this is a complete reset. 0 in ranking points for the teams. And yes, this apply even if teams are 100% mirrored in population numbers with the exact same numbers because population numbers arent everything. A team with 2500 people on it can be T1 material because there is 10 good guilds on it and a team with 2500 can be T5 material because it managed to randomly attract every single player that stares at built catapults not knowing how they work. And then they get matched together because it's random and it's still 2500 vs 2500.

Teams ranking, proper tiers and competetive play between teams wouldnt even start to settle until NEXT WEEK... which doesnt exist in the beta. 

The entire point of the restructure system is a complete reset in terms of sizes, then teams fight over rankings for 8 weeks, then it resets. Unlike now when worlds get stuck in T5 because the link system dooms them to it or stuck in T1 because of bandwagoning that Anet cannot do anything about since they arent "allowed" to break apart worlds. 

Only Anet will know if they actually achieved their goal of creating roughly even numbered teams or if the algorithm still fails. It would be funny if the "punching bag" teams are as big or even bigger than their enemies...

Edited August 14, 2022 by Dawdler.8521

[Soggy Biscuit.9372]

The "outnumbered"  buff all weekend during this season says it all. Whenever I hopped on, my team was deader than dead on every map, hardly anyone responding to any calls; the only thing somewhat alive was the map/team chat between people talking this horrid balance. Seems like many have already given up, understandably, knowing that it's either no action whatsoever or get blatantly camped by boonblobs thrice our size.

If this is how it's going to look live, it will drive people away from this already-struggling mode even faster than they ever have. And it'll be an instant turn-off  for new players they seem to intend to grab with the new xpac.