Wvw rewards: lipstick on the pig don't work. Problem is numbers imbalance.

[Gehenna.3625]

22 hours ago, Absurd.2947 said:

Imbalanced numbers are, in most cases, rooted in skill imbalance. As in most servers have the numbers, they just decide not to play because they got spawn farmed by fewer players. There is no developer fix for low skill or morale. 

Although I partially agree with you, there are developer fixes for other things that cause low morale. In essence they created part of the problem and they can definitely do something about that.

The main issue I see is twofold but it kinda comes down to the same thing. The difference between a skilled player and lesser-skilled player is enormous in numbers. Also an organized group aka a boon ball, is way more powerful than a group that's not well-organized.

Anet has consistently rewarded skillful play with way higher numbers. And ironically skilled players don't actually need that ridiculously higher output. And most people will never reach the potential with the combat system which puts them at a massive disadvantage. It should be a disadvantage, but not a massive disadvantage.

Sure, boons should make a difference, but how high a difference? To the poin that a 10 man boonball can laugh at a group of 20 random players? Or should that perhaps be a group of randoms of 15 players. That's what I mean with too much of a difference.

Anet can make the difference smaller if they want to but I also understand that it would require a massive overhaul of the combat system, because the combat system is so convolutedly complex nowadays that it will require nothing less. And that it became so convoluted is also Anet's own doing. They just kept implementing new elite specs without having properly balanced the previous specs.

It seems now though (from the new roadmap), that they may not be bringing new elite specs anymore but "combat features". But hey, Anet have changed their minds before on roadmaps so who knows? 🤷‍♂️

[Eudaimonia.8695]

24 minutes ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

 

It seems now though (from the new roadmap), that they may not be bringing new elite specs anymore but "combat features". But hey, Anet have changed their minds before on roadmaps so who knows?

They're aware of the fact that elite specs are a big driving force for expansion sales. They'd be stupid not to release any. 

Edited February 16, 2023 by Eudaimonia.8695

[Johje Holan.4607]

12 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

Someone here agreed with your reasoning, and I'm pretty sure they're all NA players. I am in EU, and I'm sorry to say but your reasoning is completely wrong.

I know EU is different.  But with respect to this argument, NA is the same I think, there is a population imbalance to begin with.  In my post above, I didn't mean to imply agreement with the statement "Imbalanced numbers are, in most cases, rooted in skill imbalance. "  That is a  false statement.

Skill can however, exacerbate the issue - skill is not only fighting skill, it can be organizational skill, leadership skill, etc.  In fact, when people talk about skill in WvW actual fighting skill is the "least skilled' skill of them all.  Organization and leadership are much more important.  Because they can increase the population.  A good leader can bring many followers, even cause people to transfer to join them.  A good pugmander can get a map queue, but when they leave, so do most of the pugs.  But ultimately, raw population does beat all.

These arguments are as old as the hills.  I like to go back and read the old archived forums.  And we were talking about these exact same things way back in the beginning.  Back then, it was the Titan Alliance on HoD, and Vizuna with their "French Canadians"; then it was BG.  Then, the argument was "recruit more people".  And that was just as big a fallacy as skill.  

[Piney.3076]

Cool, some more thoughtful posts there, happy to enourage that discussion. 

But it's quite simple. Objective rewards aren't working. Spawncampers don't want em. Spawncamped can't get em. And this is for Anet really: hey good try, it might have worked. But I think we see it ain't that.

Something is needed to make the fight more interesting and rewarding. And it's the spawn camped that need it, they are the ones that need to be convinced to play.

Maybe joke: charge campers 10g to enter spawn. Give that 10g to each camped as they get killed. Then boot the camper out and charge em again. Hell, I'd get camped for that, probably for a while. 

More serious: do something, ANYTHING to make the fight MORE even not LESS. Allowing campers to cover the spawn in siege... in fairness who could have foreseen anything that bizarre. But continuing to allow is tacit endorsement. And that's on you. This problem will continue in alliances, I will bet you 10k gold. 

SO as per post #2, put in the blue shell. Permanent airship at the spawn, expanding right up to the keep door. Stops only once the home team takes back their keep. Or equally or more crazy stuff. Both teams will be thrilled. Campers will want to brag and demonstrate skill, or so they say. Camped will find it hilarious. Won't change the outcome but might get a bit more play going. 

[Mabi black.1824]

9 hours ago, Johje Holan.4607 said:

Skill can however, exacerbate the issue - skill is not only fighting skill, it can be organizational skill, leadership skill, etc.

This is certainly true.

But we have to make a clear distinction here. I mean, if we talk about weekly flow (number of players and playing time) and we get at the end of the week that a server does not reach half of its opponent, we can say that there is a '' problem '' or rather there is an objective condition that puts a part of the players in difficulty compared to the others, and here Anet could act to guarantee / improve fun for everyone.

If instead we talk about a server that has available groups of players in fact more skilled and with an excellent organization / communication, then I think that Anet has little to do. There is nothing wrong with losing the weekly game if you have in front of you a server similar to yours (in terms of flow) but more effective than yours (in terms of skill).

[Gehenna.3625]

19 hours ago, Eudaimonia.8695 said:

They're aware of the fact that elite specs are a big driving force for expansion sales. They'd be stupid not to release any. 

I wonder if that's a fact. I suspect it's not as big a driving force as you might think, not for the general player base at least. They didn't mention elite specs at all and if it's such a big driver, as you suggest, I would've thought it would be the smart thing for Anet to specifically mention them, even just for marketing purposes.

Personally, I hope that they will make the core classes be like an elite spec, meaning that they will have one of the weapons and specializations be only available to the core class. For example, necromancer with soul reaping only being available to core classes and staff being only available to core necros.

That's a more limited way of bringing out new elite specs that could also solve some balancing issues and shake things up at the same time.

But in the end, balancing classes/elite specs has just become too much of a mess and, imo, they need to clean up that mess first before even thinking of bringing out new ones.

9 hours ago, Johje Holan.4607 said:

 But ultimately, raw population does beat all.

I don't agree with this statement. If you have an uneven fight in raw population of 60 vs 40 people, for example, the 40 people will be stronger than the 60 if the 40 are better organized than the 60. From my experience a boonball can beat twice their numbers if the others are random players grouped together.

So then raw population doesn't beat organization.

 

[Mabi black.1824]

10 hours ago, Johje Holan.4607 said:

These arguments are as old as the hills.  I like to go back and read the old archived forums.  And we were talking about these exact same things way back in the beginning

In reference to what you say, I am increasingly convinced that the responsibility is essentially ours, the player's, in his feedback that he brings here in this community of forums and in the way he communicates. Definitely not intentionally but the consequence brings me there. Maybe we had to be clearer, maybe we had to be more of a community, I don't know. But you also see it with these latest updates.

I also wrote it, but I was probably the only one. Everything you update or change, with all the good intentions of Anet, still falls on a server of 30 players on one side and on a server of 3 maps queued on the other side. If our feedback had been different over many years: Anet thank you but your community of players has indicated a priority and an update that leads to a better balance between servers. We appreciate your commitment, But the concentration of your community still remains all there.

Perhaps the story of the development of this mode would have been different.

And instead if you browse the forum you will see dozens and dozens of feedback on how you can better manage gold rather than tickets. or how we can improve the defense or attack in order to better involve the player. Many feedback are also interesting and intelligent. But never one that brings the focus of development back to the only point where it should be.

P.S. Just my personal reflection.

Edited February 17, 2023 by Mabi black.1824

[Sahne.6950]

Lipstick on the pig would be hella cute tho! 🐖

 

[Johje Holan.4607]

23 hours ago, Piney.3076 said:

SO as per post #2, put in the blue shell. Permanent airship at the spawn, expanding right up to the keep door. Stops only once the home team takes back their keep. Or equally or more crazy stuff. Both teams will be thrilled. Campers will want to brag and demonstrate skill, or so they say. Camped will find it hilarious. Won't change the outcome but might get a bit more play going. 

 

I one hundred percent agree with this.  Put in something to allow the weaker server(s) to comback/breakout.  This is actually even more important than population balance (which I don't believe can ever be achieved in a 24/7 week long format).

 

15 hours ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

I don't agree with this statement. If you have an uneven fight in raw population of 60 vs 40 people, for example, the 40 people will be stronger than the 60 if the 40 are better organized than the 60. From my experience a boonball can beat twice their numbers if the others are random players grouped together.

So then raw population doesn't beat organization.

 

I didn't mean to imply that a small organized group can't defeat a larger group in battle.  They can certainly win battles; but they won't win the war.  And when we talk about population imbalance we're generally talking about overall matches and being able to compete during the week and not individual battles.  To win, or even make it a good fight and compete, you need to have population.

[Johje Holan.4607]

14 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

I also wrote it, but I was probably the only one. Everything you update or change, with all the good intentions of Anet, still falls on a server of 30 players on one side and on a server of 3 maps queued on the other side. If our feedback had been different over many years: Anet thank you but your community of players has indicated a priority and an update that leads to a better balance between servers. We appreciate your commitment, But the concentration of your community still remains all there.

Perhaps the story of the development of this mode would have been different.

And instead if you browse the forum you will see dozens and dozens of feedback on how you can better manage gold rather than tickets. or how we can improve the defense or attack in order to better involve the player. Many feedback are also interesting and intelligent. But never one that brings the focus of development back to the only point where it should be.

Sorry for the double post but I think this deserves a seperate response.  I completely agree about the gold and tickets (rewards), less so about the defense and attack, because that kind of balance is important too.  But are you saying that the most important thing Anet can do is to balance population?  I think they are trying that, with Alliances.  But I honestly don't see how Anet can balance population over a 24/7 weeklong game mode.  I think its impossible.  What we can hope for is a relatively balanced population.  And you're right, there are plenty of things Anet can do to encourage this.  But we still need additional measures to correct any inherent mismatches: namely the things mentioned in this thread: anti-snowballing mechanics, helpful breakout mechanics, encouraging attacking the strongest server mechanics.  

Absolutely try to achieve the best population balance possible.  But I think equally important is to have mechanics in the game that seek to rectify any population imbalances that do occur.  

[Dawdler.8521]

5 hours ago, Johje Holan.4607 said:

 But are you saying that the most important thing Anet can do is to balance population?  I think they are trying that, with Alliances.  But I honestly don't see how Anet can balance population over a 24/7 weeklong game mode.  I think its impossible.  What we can hope for is a relatively balanced population. 

Yes, that is literally the whole point of world restructure.

Not the first part of what you said I mean, that is a complete fiction players constantly make up and then say world restructure is gonna fail.

The last part of what you said, where you even out the relative populations of all teams to a much flatter curve.

[Mabi black.1824]

10 hours ago, Johje Holan.4607 said:

What we can hope for is a relatively balanced population

I totally agree with your quote. The servers will be different from each other, even the times of great flow compared to the times of low flow will be different between the various servers, but in any case to get relatively balanced servers that at the end of the week record an average weekly flow that resembles or approaches numerically to each other, would be really a lot of stuff for our preferred mode.

It would really be what players have always been asking for, it would really be the change of pace of Anet for this mode.

It is clear that many initiatives and changes that Anet is proposing to us are also useful and interesting, but they should only follow and not anticipate the action that ANET has always had to face.

It is also clear that the work of alliance , was chosen precisely to address the discourse of balance between the servers , going even too far beyond what is necessary in my opinion. I imagine that before obtaining it we will have to have a lot of patience because the road of this great work needs its time. (In the last official communication of Anet, for this year 2023 this work is planned on rewards for WVW, everything else concerns PVE or seasonal events . Any other beta that concerns WWW will enter the 2024 program, if I understand correctly)

That is the reason for my remarks that you read above. Because I believe that while we wait for alliances, if the development team advances time from the planned work of alliances, it should still put it on all the viable initiatives / changes and repeatedly mentioned on this forum that bring the current servers to game flows as similar as possible to each other.

My personal view is that Anet has a duty to do so. The feedback that his community has been attending Anet for a long time is this. We should be more of a community in telling Anet. And that's what would make Anet recover 100 points from his community right away. It may not get a very good result, it could improve this relative balance slightly. We could enjoy this result for a short time because then comes alliances. Never mind. 

I think it's the only thing Anet development should address before anything else, and the WWW community should achieve.

Edited February 18, 2023 by Mabi black.1824

[Gehenna.3625]

12 hours ago, Johje Holan.4607 said:

I didn't mean to imply that a small organized group can't defeat a larger group in battle.  They can certainly win battles; but they won't win the war.  And when we talk about population imbalance we're generally talking about overall matches and being able to compete during the week and not individual battles.  To win, or even make it a good fight and compete, you need to have population.

Oh I didn't understand it like that and I'm not talking about individual battles but it just served as an example of what happens pretty much all the time. There just are some servers that take their WvW really seriously and they face off against other servers that aren't nearly as well organized. And I mean I could go on about the dumb stuff people do giving information to the other servers about where you are and how many (like zergs hitting sentinel on the way to a keep). That also makes it feel like they're everywhere.

I think people tend to stare themselves blind on dots present. But how would you know how much another side outnumbers you? You don't know. It may be that your side has more afk'ers that just cap camps, for example. When you fight an enemy zerg the enemy tends to look more numerous than your own side btw. But which zerg has the most people that are not part of the raid squad? It may just feel like you're outnumbered because you so easily lose against an opposing group whereas it may be equal but the other group is more organized and just eats you for breakfast.

This is why I feel that the population by itself, even though it is problematic, is not as problematic as organized vs randoms because you can literally fight and win against twice the amount of people with being organized and there is a max amount of players per map.