Why do Devs facilitate matchmaking exploits and believe that this results in balanced matchmaking?

[enkidu.5937]

I’m really curious, I mean _really_ curious. All the kitten that already happens in the current system, but made much easier with the introduction of alliances. How can I imagine this, one day a Dev said:

“Our matchmaking has severe problems. People are organizing mass transfers directly after relink, overstack a server, switch between accounts and play where their own team already dominates etc.”

And another Dev said:

“Ok, lets remove gem costs for transfers. Let them choose an alliance with just 2 mouse clicks. Let them overstack off hours with just 2 mouse clicks. Let them create an alliance with main accounts and another alliance with their side accounts so they can swap a whole 500 players when they are unsatisfied with their current match.”

 

 

Holy kitten, that Karma train will be huge, I mean _really_ huge! 😵 And that massive pile of dead randoms. Organized alliances will have scouts that switch between accounts and spot random public zergs. And if they find one, they will call the bois and CA-TSHING, baggybaggybaggy-wooooosh ! ! ! 😝

 

 

And those poor randoms can’t even switch the matchup and escape . . . or maybe they can, if they buy a second account 🤑

[Dawdler.8521]

Why would you need to buy an account?

Even today you can just create a F2P on every open server and play wherever you want.

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

enkidu, why would u make a random sh#tpost without considering that alliances basically bind the matches and reject random transferring around way more effectively than it currently is the case...?

 

and even outside of that, the rough balance of servers is always the same, its just player swarms wandering around servers. and pretty much every good player has at least one alt account, often way more

besides, "made much easier with the introduction...".. erm alliances is not even in beta really yet. its just partially betatests. u cannot blame nothing on that.

furthermore, the biggest EU alliance guilds had not even 300/500 players filled in the last run, i think. and of our 300~, there was mostly barely 100 online at one time, often just around 60-70 or less

 

also only newbie blobs do effectively karmatrains... and those people only matter against other similar PPT-minded groups who cannot organize against them, well yeah, happens

anets battle balancing sadly makes it time and again harder for small groups to fight off bigger ones, which caused the whole system to be done for anyways.

like, we lost most existing openfield guilds in EU, idk why or how u would even effectively form alliances anymore. the active players just have to chase content, bc most casual snowflakes only chase their ppt and blob up to insane size before even leaving spawn. at some relation it by now is just too big too die in too many cases.

THIS is the issue, not some imaginary pink ktrain elephant that you'd feel to see

[enkidu.5937]

5 hours ago, kamikharzeeh.8016 said:

like, we lost most existing openfield guilds in EU, idk why or how u would even effectively form alliances anymore. the active players just have to chase content, bc most casual snowflakes only chase their ppt and blob up to insane size before even leaving spawn. at some relation it by now is just too big too die in too many cases.

THIS is the issue, not some imaginary pink ktrain elephant that you'd feel to see

You already answered everything yourself. No need for me to add anything else. Why people will form alliances -> for easy brain-afk blobbing. So it will inevitably end in an epic Karma train, choo-choo 🤪

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

its not alliances that creates this, its done since long time and getting worse with each "bAlAnCe pAtCh" aka "nerf dmg and heals and size wins #skillgame"

[Ronin.4501]

On 9/2/2022 at 5:28 PM, Dawdler.8521 said:

Why would you need to buy an account?

Even today you can just create a F2P on every open server and play wherever you want.

This never made any sense to me. Allowing F2P accounts (and thus endless alt accounts on every server) in WvW seemed like a terrible idea from the start. Why transfer when you can just make a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) FREE account on a different server instead? I suspect alt accounts are part of the reason we see so many population imbalances as well; If your main account's match-up for the week is garbage, just swap over to the alt account instead...which of course leads to servers appearing "full" when in fact it's just being populated by F2P alt accounts.

It would make more sense if Anet limited F2P accounts to say, 100 hours of WvW, and then are required to actually purchase the full game. It would either generate a lot more revenue for Anet OR get rid of all the F2P alt accounts which would be a win for the WvW community at-large. But then again, a lot of the previous decisions by Anet have never made much sense when it comes to WvW...

[Labjax.2465]

On 9/4/2022 at 2:04 AM, Ronin.4501 said:

This never made any sense to me. Allowing F2P accounts (and thus endless alt accounts on every server) in WvW seemed like a terrible idea from the start. Why transfer when you can just make a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) FREE account on a different server instead? I suspect alt accounts are part of the reason we see so many population imbalances as well; If your main account's match-up for the week is garbage, just swap over to the alt account instead...which of course leads to servers appearing "full" when in fact it's just being populated by F2P alt accounts.

It would make more sense if Anet limited F2P accounts to say, 100 hours of WvW, and then are required to actually purchase the full game. It would either generate a lot more revenue for Anet OR get rid of all the F2P alt accounts which would be a win for the WvW community at-large. But then again, a lot of the previous decisions by Anet have never made much sense when it comes to WvW...

Account management is an interesting thing. I remember in the original SWG, it was a sub game and you could have one character per server (servers were also completely separate entities, unlike in this game). The roles were also designed to be interdependent rather than self-sufficient. So the idea was, unless you paid for multiple subs, you weren't going to be navigating the game solo. It's the only MMO I've seen that was designed to be social from the ground up. GW2 is kind of like that in some ways with open world, but it's also highly solo-oriented.

Anyway, the point is, doing something like F2P def factors into design and what's doable. If GW2 was a sub game, it would prob not have the problem you describe or it would be very minimal. It's a lesson on how the way a game is monetized can't be separated from the design experience of the game itself. It brings baggage with it.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

This isn't sPvP, who is creating F2P accounts for WvW? Wouldn't you be locked out of mounts, gliding, and all the other expansion things along with being limited by nature of free account? 

There's nothing to gain from this...

[Ronin.4501]

16 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

This isn't sPvP, who is creating F2P accounts for WvW? Wouldn't you be locked out of mounts, gliding, and all the other expansion things along with being limited by nature of free account? 

There's nothing to gain from this...

Talk to most any player in WvW nowadays and they'll tell you they have multiple accounts, all for the purposes of jumping to a different server without actually needing to transfer.  Many have even gone to the lengths of getting legendary armor/weapons/trinkets for their alt accounts.

I still only have one account and feel like I'm in the extreme minority at this point. As to what's available/unavailable for the F2P accounts, I don't know as my GW2 account is fully paid for.

[Luthan.5236]

I never really understood why people want to play on the strongest server - always found it to be a pain when you had to walk to long to encounter an enemy because you had to go to the enemy spawn to be lucky to sometimes get a kill. 😄

Balanced is better. Or defending on a losing team when the enemies come to you and you just need.  Relinking and stuff ... probably increased (or created) the problems though - I guess. I only played from release until end 2013 and enjoyed to play on Underworld (never changed servers) back then - even though we were the weakest pretty often at that time. Nice community. Fun trying to fight back. Came back much later in June 2019 when the linking stuff existed already for a long time.

With linking and lost "server identity" - less interesting. (Alliances will be the point when WvW really is only for rewards only for me then.) With the linking (and relinking) people actually would transfer out of fear ending up with a weaker link - or something like that? I guess? When you have stable community without the relinks ... then it should balance itself. (I guess even at the top people should get bored if it is really only pwning and spawn camping even in tier 1 strongest vs the 2 weaker servers.) Would make people transfer until the populations are balanced.

Relinking ... makes them unbalanced. (Especially if there is no real good system to count the active population.) Though here for balancing the alliances system should help. Since this is supposed to balance the population ... unless people really get mached vs. their own alt accounts (alt accounts in the enemy team) - and then decide to just not log in there to win with the main account. (Or vice versa.) But that could only happen randomly - should not be possible to plan this to abuse it.

Edited October 16, 2022 by Luthan.5236