WvW Beta - Alliances - Population and activity balance

[nthmetal.9652]

Alliances are supposed to tackle the server linking and population balance thing. It is a good idea to do something about this, maybe even at the cost of destroying server communities. However, after so many betas now, I fail to see improvements.

I'm playing on Grenth's Door this time around.

https://i.imgur.com/AwmoYqV.png

https://imgur.com/R1QokY4

This happens mainly, because when we bring 50 people, the enemies have 2x50 (or 50 and additionally groups flipping objectives).  And this was during the weekend, when generally more players have time.

It's also not due to abysmal fight performance, k/d ratio at least looks okay.

https://imgur.com/puXK5yp

So, if restructuring beta, where Anet has MORE control over population balance then they will have during actual alliances, cannot solve the population imbalance issues, how is alliances supposed to do so? Wouldn't it be better to take those ideas from alliances, that might actually work, and attach those to the current server structure, mainly:

• do not allow transfers during a linkup period, only during a set interval towards the end of a linkup period

and in addition to that, maybe see that a single server isn't left without a link and closed too often? Maybe not only factor in population balance, but also give some factor to the success of the server.

And finally: Rework the reward structure, make WvW as rewarding as PvE?

[Dawdler.8521]

What if... hear me out... teams are randomly matched against each other with no tier structure because this week is the eqvivalent of 1st week of relinks with random team positions?

What you are seeing may be a T1 competetive team fighting T2, T3, T4 or even T5 teams. Or just about any tier vs any other tier.

How is that supposed to balance out? Well, next week that dominating team will go up a position and fight better teams that might be able to compete with it.

Oh wait.

Right.

We're missing half the bloody gamemode here.

[nthmetal.9652]

14 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

What you are seeing may be a T1 competetive team fighting T2, T3, T4 or even T5 teams. Or just about any tier vs any other tier.

But what you are talking about caters more towards the performance aspect of a team, while I am talking mainly about the population aspect. Yes, the tiers will do something about the performance aspect - but as the years in server-based WvW have taught me, I wouldn't have too high expectations regarding tier structure.

The effects I am describing are mainly a population imbalance thing. It isn't the enemy teams being better. We bring our 35 players and regularly take on 50+ with success. And of course we know how to take objectives as well as the enemies. But when we take one objective, they take 2. That's also not performance-related. It's purely population related.

[Spurnshadow.3678]

WvW is more rewarding than PvE.  It doesn't need a reward rework.

 

On top of the loot you get from killing players, which is akin to killing monsters but better because you get tokens you can turn into more loot, there's also event rewards from defending or taking objectives, higher loot rewards from higher tier monsters, WvW pip reward system which gives tons of stuff PASSIVELY and whichever reward track you want, which, depending on your choice, gives tons of stuff PASSIVLY and often more resources than you could ever get in PvE for the time.  Not to mention all the legendary gear, who's ingredients you get passively while playing.

Edited December 4, 2022 by Spurnshadow.3678

[Custodio.6134]

1 hour ago, Spurnshadow.3678 said:

WvW is more rewarding than PvE.  It doesn't need a reward rework.

i have no idea what game you are playing, because it´s certainly not GW2's WvW. 

lemme give you a quick overview: 
      
the most profitable, repeatable reward-track is currently worth ~18 gold. 
The minimum time for completing a reward track (without boosters) is 8h 35m (103 ticks), where 195 points are earned per tick. The overall minimal time to complete a reward track is 3h 50m (46 ticks), where all available boosters increases the points per tick from 195 to 438.       

Source: wiki

So, this results in slightly more than 2 gold/hour passively from playing. 

Additionally, let´s assume you get an average of 100 kills per hour. a kill on average has a 33% of giving a heavy lootbag and a proc of scavenger-protocols. so in that hour, you gain 33 heavy lootbags and 33 scavenger-protocol bags. 

a heavy lootbag is worth ~2 silver (source: fast.farming-community) and a scavenger bag: magic trophies is about 1,5 silver (source: fast.farming-community). 

So from kills (excluding rank-up bags) you gain ~66 silver from heavy lootbags and ~50 silver from scavenger protocols per hour

so overall, that´s an average gain of 3,30 gold/hour for playing WvW (being optimistic here, these numbers can be much lower depending on the player rank, the matchup, activity etc etc)

for comparison: an organized Dragon's End meta including Pre-Events has about 45 gold/hour (assuming you convert all currencies and loot you gained during the duration into gold). (Source: fast.farming-community)

So even if we assume you have a bad run, and only get a quarter of the loot possible, it´s still more than 11 times more profitable than WvW

Edited December 4, 2022 by Custodio.6134

[Xenesis.6389]

1 hour ago, Custodio.6134 said:

 (assuming you convert all currencies and loot you gained during the duration into gold). (Source: fast.farming-community)

Not that I disagree with wvw being the lowest earning area, but if you're going to make comparisons you need to also convert everything you earn in wvw. There's also skirmish track rewards, nodes, badge/heroic/ticket currencies, memories of battle, unidentified gear, all that has value as well.

[Custodio.6134]

13 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

There's also skirmish track rewards, nodes, badge/heroic/ticket currencies, memories of battle, unidentified gear, all that has value as well.

correct. The thing is: 

the skirmish-track is the one you can at least partially still calculate on. But the skirmish-track alone already has a lot of variables, that make a huge difference comparing one player to a different one.

For comparison: a completely fresh player, without any rank-/commitment-/public-/commander-bonus, assuming the world is always ranked last in the skirmish, takes 24 hours to complete its skirmish-track completely through the first instace of diamond-chest. 

on the other end (the extreme): a player with Rank 10k under the same conditions completes this in 10 hours and 5 mins. just from its rank bonus. 

to completely go into full extremo-mode: If that player also had played the week before, and had a public tag running, and the world would be placed always first, this would go down even further to 6 hours 25 mins

So you see, just the skirmish-track alone makes a huge difference and has too many variables. And that is probably the most steady, guaranteed loot you can get from there. (accounting for the reward track too, since the skirmish-track progress also impacts the reward track progress)

Nodes and any loot from players is neither guaranteed, nor in any way a stable source of income as it varies heavily depending on what the player does in terms or roaming/zerging/smallscale/whatever. 

 

Edited December 4, 2022 by Custodio.6134

[Luthan.5236]

You mainly should check the victory points. Since the "coverage" can't really be measured. There always will be some people that try to capture everything during night.

+ then we need to take into account that this did not use the balancing yet. (As someone above mentioned - similar after a relink. Though basically they should have more options and should also be able to - for the relinking we still have for now - measure things a bit there. But only how many players logged in to a WvW map ... I guess. Not when and how often they were active.)

More important thing: For the beta a lot of players might decide to opt out (only getting the skin) ... waiting for the "real" WvW again. Not everyone is fond of the alliances/restructuring stuff ... + then there might be people that only avoid beta stuff (that still might play a lot later after the beta). Can't say that this is exactly the same amount of people that played during non-beta times. Therefore: Data based on the previous week can be wrong already. (Unless ... they use data from the previous beta. To see how many people are playing the betas.)

Edited December 4, 2022 by Luthan.5236

[Xenesis.6389]

6 minutes ago, Custodio.6134 said:

Nodes and any loot from players is neither guaranteed, nor in any way a stable source of income as it varies heavily depending on what the player does in terms or roaming/zerging/smallscale/whatever. 

And yet you used lootbags which are earned under the same conditions. 🤷‍♂️

P.S I'm not trying to give you a hard time, this is just a pattern I'm pointing out whenever someone compares wvw value of loot to pve, they only pick one or two things to assign the value while taking pve's full value.

Edited December 4, 2022 by Xenesis.6389

[Custodio.6134]

2 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

And yet you used lootbags which are earned under the same conditions. 🤷‍♂️

yes, and even considering them, we are still WAY below PvE, which additionally has lower requirements


(and yes, i am aware that i try to compare to totally different types of getting income with each other. But since we have no way of reliably compare those directly, our only way is to compare all loot gained in PvE, with an average of loot in WvW against each other, while making estimates for WvW and averaging them out, which is what i at leat tried)

Edited December 4, 2022 by Custodio.6134

[Xenesis.6389]

2 minutes ago, Custodio.6134 said:

yes, and even considering them, we are still WAY below PvE, which additionally has lower requirements

As I said I don't disagree with that. See my ps above.

[Dawdler.8521]

3 hours ago, nthmetal.9652 said:

The effects I am describing are mainly a population imbalance thing. It isn't the enemy teams being better. We bring our 35 players and regularly take on 50+ with success. And of course we know how to take objectives as well as the enemies. But when we take one objective, they take 2. That's also not performance-related. It's purely population related.

Is it? How do you know what happens when you arent online? What about your roamers? What about your havocs? What about your smaller guilds? What about your commanders? What about the rest of the borders? There's alot more to coverage than just just beating a zerg.

Even if we assume a perfectly equal 50 vs 50 fight, with exactly the same play time, with exactly the same builds... one of the sides can loose every single time because the commander has the tactical sense of a bent cucumber. And once that side loose, it'll loose even more because we all know what happens - people leave because they loose. Which make their side loose even more. Scales can tip incredibly fast even if they where technically "balanced". 

I've seen the same thing happen daily at smaller scale. Just a few enemies can come in and absolutely dominate a border even when there is plenty of friendlies that should be more than enough to take them on at 3-4x their numbers, but most of them has the strategical urgency of a garden sprinkler so of course they are never capable of intercepting them at strength and instead drop in one by one only to get slaughtered.

There is always alot more to this than "purely population".

[One more for the road.8950]

41 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

 because the commander has the tactical sense of a bent cucumber.

I know this guy!
Sorry, I mean guys. I know several of these guys.

Some has the tactical sense of a straight cucumber, though.

[Xenesis.6389]

20 minutes ago, One more for the road.8950 said:

I know this guy!
Sorry, I mean guys. I know several of these guys.

Some has the tactical sense of a straight cucumber, though.

Don't we all. 🤭

Props to them for putting up a tag and putting up with the cucumbers around them, but learn from the mistake at the very least, it takes me one or two fights to figure what mistakes a commander or groups is going to do. You know the usual, stops moving and stands in red rings too long, walks backwards instead of full turns, positions their zerg between a wall and blob, puts their zerg in the middle of two enemy zergs when you should always have them in front of you, never learns after the first second and even third time they're portal bombed on... and so on and so on...

Edited December 4, 2022 by Xenesis.6389

[Kal Durak.2830]

4 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

What if... hear me out... teams are randomly matched against each other with no tier structure because this week is the eqvivalent of 1st week of relinks with random team positions?

What you are seeing may be a T1 competetive team fighting T2, T3, T4 or even T5 teams. Or just about any tier vs any other tier.

How is that supposed to balance out? Well, next week that dominating team will go up a position and fight better teams that might be able to compete with it.

Oh wait.

Right.

We're missing half the bloody gamemode here.

Yeah like, what are you really saying... "Randomly Matched" - Define, by participation, time zone etc...  You constantly post trolling...

Edited December 4, 2022 by DtenCfour.3567

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, DtenCfour.3567 said:

Yeah like, what are you really saying... "Randomly Matched" - Define, by participation, time zone etc...  You constantly post trolling...

I apologize for trolling posts about how basic WvW matchmaking works. I know it confuses some people.

[Mabi black.1824]

19 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

What if... hear me out... teams are randomly matched against each other with no tier structure because this week is the eqvivalent of 1st week of relinks with random team positions?

What you are seeing may be a T1 competetive team fighting T2, T3, T4 or even T5 teams. Or just about any tier vs any other tier.

How is that supposed to balance out? Well, next week that dominating team will go up a position and fight better teams that might be able to compete with it.

Oh wait.

Right.

We're missing half the bloody gamemode here.

This is a good point, it definitely affects what you can see for a week of beta testing. But at the same time it brings us to a reflection of when you voted for an 8-week alliance period. It will probably take you 3 or 4 weeks to position the teams correctly, so that they can start to get serious, and really have fun. So what do you have left? 4 weeks to give players the opportunity to climb a leaderboard and win a tournament? 

4 weeks to try to build a community of teams transported by a single goal? And then you delete everything and everything around you will be completely another. You're still sure to build competition in a competitive game of Worlds vs Worlds with such a short season. Boring as death a 10-year season, but also completely useless a 2-month season.

[Venport.3925]

19 hours ago, nthmetal.9652 said:

Alliances are supposed to tackle the server linking and population balance thing. It is a good idea to do something about this, maybe even at the cost of destroying server communities. However, after so many betas now, I fail to see improvements.

I'm playing on Grenth's Door this time around.

This isn't even bad compared to what we see on a regular basis in non-beta WvW, Sure you're losing, but you don't consistently have a team with more than 60% of the ppt and occasionally shutting the other two teams out on its own.

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

This is a good point, it definitely affects what you can see for a week of beta testing. But at the same time it brings us to a reflection of when you voted for an 8-week alliance period. It will probably take you 3 or 4 weeks to position the teams correctly, so that they can start to get serious, and really have fun. So what do you have left? 4 weeks to give players the opportunity to climb a leaderboard and win a tournament? 

4 weeks to try to build a community of teams transported by a single goal? And then you delete everything and everything around you will be completely another. You're still sure to build competition in a competitive game of Worlds vs Worlds with such a short season. Boring as death a 10-year season, but also completely useless a 2-month season.

Unfortunetly I never stated what I voted in the poll thread and I cant remember either, but for reference this was my first response:

"I dont find any of the options interesting because in my mind any quicker linking absolutely require a change in server identites to show players on both pairs ingame. We cannot have a monthly change that rip apart a diffuse and mixed server blob. We would get bursts of toxic and confused players every month. It would be incredibly unfriendly to new WvW players, which would be bad because we need everyone. If pairs are kept distinct and separate so everyone knows where they stand it will however be OK."

(also they never made pairs distinct, lol)

Edited December 5, 2022 by Dawdler.8521

[Mabi black.1824]

What I want to try to say is that finding a way because winning means something, motivating and stimulating your players in the long run, is as important as getting similar and well-balanced teams. I'm also okay with constantly changing servers, I can consider it a sort of training or opportunity to meet between the various guilds to build alliances. Let's say for a period of 6 months of free WVW. then I would also like another 6 months ( July - December ) of WVW competitive team. Put a nice prize to the first three classified (make a new legendary armor skin 3 pieces of armor of your choice to the first classified 2 pieces to the second and 1 piece to the third. In single-color, bronze, silver and gold you have to complete the bronze to access the silver and then the gold. and this is just one example among many) 

At Christmas the teams at the top of the tournament collect their prizes, then we enter 6 months of free WWW (with servers that also reform every month if you want) and in July a new season starts again. Anet randomly builds its servers full of single player guilds and alliances, and that will be your team for 6 months of competitive wvw.

I don't know what to come up with anymore to motivate players in the long run, so that winning can still mean something like in the good old days. If you want to recover returning players and see this mode grow, I think it is essential that with alliances we get balanced teams in a competitive environment that is still based on servers.

temporary, seasonal, random, everything is fine but still servers. Unique container you can use to allow great teams to compete with each other.

 

Edited December 5, 2022 by Mabi black.1824

[Dawdler.8521]

7 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

What I want to try to say is that finding a way because winning means something, motivating and stimulating your players in the long run, is as important as getting similar and well-balanced teams. I'm also okay with constantly changing servers, I can consider it a sort of training or opportunity to meet between the various guilds to build alliances. Let's say for a period of 6 months of free WVW. then I would also like another 6 months ( July - December ) of WVW competitive team. Put a nice prize to the first three classified (make a new legendary armor skin 3 pieces of armor of your choice to the first classified 2 pieces to the second and 1 piece to the third. In single-color, bronze, silver and gold you have to complete the bronze to access the silver and then the gold. and this is just one example among many) 

At Christmas the teams at the top of the tournament collect their prizes, then we enter 6 months of free WWW (with servers that also reform every month if you want) and in July a new season starts again. Anet randomly builds its servers full of single player guilds and alliances, and that will be your team for 6 months of competitive wvw.

I don't know what to come up with anymore to motivate players in the long run, so that winning can still mean something like in the good old days. If you want to recover returning players and see this mode grow, I think it is essential that with alliances we get balanced teams in a competitive environment that is still based on servers.

temporary, seasonal, random, everything is fine but still servers. Unique container you can use to allow great teams to compete with each other.

 

Except people wont compete because their attention span doesnt last that long. Aside from the ancient poll showing that short time was preferable, take a poll at the end of every 2 months and I bet a majority will be glad to get rid of the old link and try something new because its already been long enough.

Your 6 months will probably be about 2 months of actually trying, 2 months of getting nowhere and then realize you still got 2 months so its utterly pointless to even try to WvW because you're sick of it.

[nthmetal.9652]

On 12/4/2022 at 7:53 PM, Dawdler.8521 said:

There is always alot more to this than "purely population".

I am well aware of this, but the points do tell enough of a story. I don't really see a shift in who gets first or second place.

Of course I could now assume that outside of primetime (during which I KNOW we are outnumbered) population is more balanced ... and our people simply do nothing, while staying in that mode. I find that unlikely, though. It is much more likely that we are not only outnumbered during primetime, but also  during other periods and that's the reason the point distribution doesn't really shift.

Hence my post about population balance. And I hear similar stories from friendly guildies in other matchups. Some having caught the short end, other being on the opposite side and winning with ease.

Also, thanks a lot for the description of combat ability with "bent cucumber" and "strategical urgency of a garden sprinkler". Made me laugh 😄

[Mabi black.1824]

14 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Except people wont compete because their attention span doesnt last that long. Aside from the ancient poll showing that short time was preferable, take a poll at the end of every 2 months and I bet a majority will be glad to get rid of the old link and try something new because its already been long enough.

Your 6 months will probably be about 2 months of actually trying, 2 months of getting nowhere and then realize you still got 2 months so its utterly pointless to even try to WvW because you're sick of it.

Keep in mind that during the 6 months of competition you will continue to have weekly matches, so you will still have your Friday night when the score starts all over again. and you will still have your matches even not every 2 months better every month ( more dynamic than what we have now ) the only thing that changes is to randomly replenish your server. you will have to keep your own server built by Arenanet randomly for a period of 6 months, so as to participate in an official World vs World tournament. 

We are stuck in practically a meaningless competition for all the reasons we have known for practically since pairings have become a thing, 6 years I would say. I'm proposing a 6-month season (I personally would also do 1 year) with rules and official score (and there would be a lot to say about how to build a new points system for servers to make the competition more exciting) if you win you get a unique prize that you can not get otherwise. 

6 years compared to 6 months I propose, I can't believe you're bored. Then when you finish the season you start over.Think carefully about what I'm proposing because I can't believe that I can't find anything good in it.

[enkidu.5937]

On 12/4/2022 at 3:48 PM, nthmetal.9652 said:

So, if restructuring beta, where Anet has MORE control over population balance then they will have during actual alliances, cannot solve the population imbalance issues, how is alliances supposed to do so?

The new concept is easy:

(1) get into an alliance, enjoy the kindergarden drama of a multi-guildleader-controlled alliance, meet with you friends at the same time zone and blob the bags out of EOTM2.0 (formerly known as WvW)

(2) be the bags

😎

[Burial.1958]

This Beta is the worst one in regards of pop balance.