Extra ebg map for a few hours after reset

[blp.3489]

I'm curious what downsides there would be to having an extra ebg map that appeared after reset and then disappeared after however many hours queues normal last for. Play on the extra map would award points the same as play on the usual ebg does.  There might not be time or motivation to upgrade the structures to the same degree but that would apply equally to all three teams.

If it were viable to add maps at specific times when queues normally occur then it would be possible to have higher numbers of people on each team without the drawback of larger queues, which would allow for higher map populations the rest of the time, presuming you reduced the number of tiers. Having higher populations on the maps during nonpeak times would make play during those times much more fun.

[Polar.8634]

That's why edge of the mists existed

[Chaba.5410]

The downside is instead of 4 maps, there are now 5 and the team that can't queue 5 maps is punished by teams that can. We already get that with 4 maps so why would you want to make that worse?

Edited June 22, 2023 by Chaba.5410

[TheGrimm.5624]

<Chester Cat Grin> Will be back to this one on the morrow. 2:10, alarm in 5:30, its not reset, sleep over-rated. But interesting topic so...thanks for the bookmark.

[ShadowCatz.8437]

31 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

The downside is instead of 4 maps, there are now 5 and the team that can't queue 5 maps is punished by teams that can. We already get that with 4 maps so why would you want to make that worse?

From my understanding OP aren't asking about 5 maps at once as the one map (EBG) would just be replacing all other 4 while there is down time during reset in WvW. The main problem would be technically that this EGB2 would be an overflow map as World vs World is still with a limit for how many player that can be on each World at the same time.

Another issue here would be that there would be a very short time as most reset doesn't take that much time to go online again for WvW. Reset in WvW is to sum up PPT and calculate tier (which in turn makes out which Worlds that would get linked), so that would also be an issue if EBG2 would still count for rewards and points.

 

Edited June 22, 2023 by ShadowCatz.8437

[Dawdler.8521]

We're outnumbered on every map!

What's the solution?!

Well add more maps, clearly.

[ShadowCatz.8437]

Just now, Dawdler.8521 said:

We're outnumbered on every map!

What's the solution?!

Well add more maps, clearly.

Aren't you happy to have permanent buff or is it a debuff? Not sure anymore... 😛

[joneirikb.7506]

EotM already fills that niche, just that people doesn't think it fills it well.

 

If you're first going to add/remove maps, I'd prefer my old suggestion of changing the entire wvw into a system that has 1 EBG as base. And adds maps (ABL, DBL, EotM, EBG...repeat) as needed based on the population of the middle sized server at any given time. Have it constantly auto balance itself to the actual population in a match all day long.

[Esufer.8762]

8 hours ago, Polar.8634 said:

That's why edge of the mists existed

Yeah, this. Making Edge of the Mists actually contribute to the main matchup would probably make reset night a bit more fun rather than queue wars. Not a huge fan of how much of a ballache it is to get around though.

[Thomas.2564]

HELL NO! 1 monkey cage is more then enough 😅

[kash.9213]

If alliances are supposed to balance out populations and there's no elaborate alliance stacking then adding a new map instance for a couple of hours at reset shouldn't be too problematic. 

If there's anything beyond kills and combat support though wherever the temporary grounds are that the spillover fight happens, even a moderate imbalance can give a snowballing advantage to the more robust alliance who can spread out to take and defend.

I would flag for my alliance in open world pvp for a couple of hours until I get into a map, but maybe different hot spots or open world maps each week. 

Edited June 22, 2023 by kash.9213

[Riba.3271]

EU:

4 tiers (currently 5)

5 maps (2 EBG + 3 Borderlands)

The other EB doesnt have be exactly same

 

please

[TheGrimm.5624]

Add a fifth map. Would help with queues and doesn't need to be a borderland. Since it's not a borderland, make sure its 3 sided.

EoTM would work or if new map make sure it has a mix of styles. May have to play with some bad doodles just to give the people that can draw extra props for those of us that can't.

[blp.3489]

On 6/22/2023 at 2:48 AM, Chaba.5410 said:

The downside is instead of 4 maps, there are now 5 and the team that can't queue 5 maps is punished by teams that can. We already get that with 4 maps so why would you want to make that worse?

The motivation is that the size of the teams is currently heavily influenced by avoiding big queues at peak times, the side effect of which is that the maps are underpopulated at non-peak times, if there was an alternate way to avoid queues at peak times it would allow the maps to be less underpopulated at non-peak times.

Another perspective would be as the problem of mismatched populations already exists anyway, perhaps we should just accept it to the extent that we can't improve it with WR efforts.  If your team can't viably compete on five maps then why not take advantage of per map limits and choose four on which to be fully competitive.  A lot of people don't care about "winning" the points game anyway so why get hung up on the existence of a map that your team can't hold?  Take it as a good thing that your team isn't queued but you have enough players to have good gaming on most of the maps.

On 6/22/2023 at 7:14 AM, joneirikb.7506 said:

If you're first going to add/remove maps, I'd prefer my old suggestion of changing the entire wvw into a system that has 1 EBG as base. And adds maps (ABL, DBL, EotM, EBG...repeat) as needed based on the population of the middle sized server at any given time. Have it constantly auto balance itself to the actual population in a match all day long.

This would be one extreme of the idea, only have one big match and grow and shrink the number of available maps to match the current population.  The desired outcome would be that you would never have dead maps and there would always be good action any time you signed on.  As you aggregate teams the imbalances between the teams should be reduced and easier for the WR system to balance out.

I don't have a clear vision of how one would organize large numbers of maps or movement between them.  It seems there is potential for interesting aspects where access to a map was through portals/gates so that you need to take an objective in order to access a map or part of a map.  That would make defending that objective more worthwhile and perhaps focus conflict at such objectives.

Coordinating team efforts would also become more challenging if you have dozens of maps, although it could potentially be quite interesting with the opportunity for subgroups of the team to take responsibility for specific maps or parts of the maps thus giving guilds and alliances a sort of physical presence/territory.

An added bonus is for those who have an interest in fights with specific opponents you would always have access, at least to the ones that aren't on your team.  The group you want to fight would never be locked away in a separate match.  No more stale matches.

[WeightTrainer.3219]

On 6/21/2023 at 8:45 PM, blp.3489 said:

I'm curious what downsides there would be to having an extra ebg map that appeared after reset and then disappeared after however many hours queues normal last for. Play on the extra map would award points the same as play on the usual ebg does.  There might not be time or motivation to upgrade the structures to the same degree but that would apply equally to all three teams.

If it were viable to add maps at specific times when queues normally occur then it would be possible to have higher numbers of people on each team without the drawback of larger queues, which would allow for higher map populations the rest of the time, presuming you reduced the number of tiers. Having higher populations on the maps during nonpeak times would make play during those times much more fun.

 I think alot of people want to go to ebg because of smc perhaps? So maybe just take the 3 borderlands maps and revamp them so each map out of the 4 total is completely unique. remove each team from having their own bl and every map is just an equal 3 way? Maybe have a castle on each map, or something of equivalent points it doesn't have to be called a "castle" or w/e. Perhaps that would make people want to go straight to the other 3 maps and game there if that makes sense. Add that in to the above comments of adding an extra map if needed. so maybe it starts with 3 unique maps and if each map has a queue and queues hit like 5 for each map then a 4th map gets pulled into the tier (maybe from out of 6 or 7 total unique maps) and it gets pulled at random for each tier. and it that 4th map hits a queue of +5 and the other maps all have at least queues of 5 then a 5th randomly selected unique map gets pulled into that tier or something. maybe one map could emphasize under water combat or something..

Edited June 25, 2023 by WeightTrainer.3219

[Dayra.7405]

Simply give Pips & Skirmish Reward Track Progress to EotM, Problem solved.

If you add another map to normal WvW (even temp.) you add just more imbalance to the matches. Not every team has enough player and commander to fill a 5. map, not even on reset.

Edited June 25, 2023 by Dayra.7405

[blp.3489]

4 hours ago, Dayra.7405 said:

Simply give Pips & Skirmish Reward Track Progress to EotM, Problem solved.

If you add another map to normal WvW (even temp.) you add just more imbalance to the matches. Not every team has enough player and commander to fill a 5. map, not even on reset.

Perhaps Anet could enable pips and skirmish reward track progress on EotM whenever all the maps are queued.  I'm assuming they have a valid reason to not have them all the time, those issues occurred before my time, something about out of control karma trains I think?  I don't have the experience to know whether players will be okay with larger queues provided they can earn pips and skirmish progress on EotM.

I'm hoping that WR will bring team numbers more in line and therefore mitigate imbalances at least at reset.  I am also not sure how much of an issue such imbalances really are given the current general lack of interest in "the score" and the equal opportunity each world has to bring greater numbers of players at specific times, especially if WR does its job, and it should certainly do better than the current system with servers and links both of which have quite variable numbers.  As long as WR can match total player hours per team it should all even out. 

I think that play wise everyone would benefit from greater around the clock map populations enough that that would outweigh imbalances at specific times.

Edit: A team can always completely ignore additional maps that get added in which case they miss out on points for objectives held, but nothing more, they aren't at any greater disadvantage on the maps they are on.  And nobody cares about points anyway so...  (okay, the team with outsized numbers would have access to more sources of supply but that isn't that big of a deal)

Edited June 26, 2023 by blp.3489

[Chaba.5410]

3 hours ago, blp.3489 said:

Edit: A team can always completely ignore additional maps that get added in which case they miss out on points for objectives held, but nothing more, they aren't at any greater disadvantage on the maps they are on.  And nobody cares about points anyway so...  (okay, the team with outsized numbers would have access to more sources of supply but that isn't that big of a deal)

Yet this is exactly why it's a negative. More maps that a team can't populate means the larger server can snowball more than they do now. Imagine logging in and you have yet another map with automatically upgraded T3 objectives to try to take back in addition to the other maps and the only reason for this is so that larger servers have smaller queues?

Edit: Although now that I think about it, upgrade status may be a little different if the extra map is only available during an expected high activity skirmish like NA Prime.

Edited June 26, 2023 by Chaba.5410

[Ronin.4501]

The problem I have with this is that on several servers, you'll have a large queue for EBG while all 3 borderland maps have outnumbered simply because there is a large contingent of players who refuse to play any other map besides EBG. Presumably you do have at least some players who will go help out on the borderland maps while they're queued up for EBG. Adding a 2nd EBG, even for a limited period of time, would only make the population on the borderland maps even worse for all the servers whose playerbase is primarily EBG-centric.  No thank you.

EDIT: And yes, sadly there are servers who do this even on reset night; they'll have a 50-man queue for EBG but at least one borderland map will have outnumbered with maybe 10-15 players on it.

Edited June 26, 2023 by Ronin.4501

[TheQuickFox.3826]

On 6/22/2023 at 3:49 AM, Polar.8634 said:

That's why edge of the mists existed

Update Edge of the Mists with pips, warclaw and gliding and maybe an extra waypoint for ease of navigation and it will be active again.

[Polar.8634]

5 minutes ago, TheQuickFox.3826 said:

Update Edge of the Mists with pips, warclaw and gliding and maybe an extra waypoint for ease of navigation and it will be active again.

yes, they effectivelly disabled map after disabling rewards and discontinuing updates. If they do this to any other instance in the game, result would be same

[blp.3489]

If you think about this in the hypothetical situation where WR is in place and does a reasonably good job of matching total player hours of all the players on all the teams then an imbalance now will be a reverse imbalance sometime later, so not a big issue as long as you don't get to the point where the peak hours don't overlap.  Although I doubt that would actually occur, if the WR system also took time of day hours were played into account it could avoid that problem.

Consider another hypothetical situation where the matching is working as stated above but team size has also been doubled.  The majority of the time there will be more players on the map which should lead to more enjoyable play for everyone most of the time.  The downside is that during peak hours some players will get stuck in long queues, and those players won't like that at all.  An obvious solution is to open up additional maps only during peak periods.  Those maps could be new maps, a copy of an existing map, or possibly an EotM map if that was okay with players.

Alternately, you could just increase the number of maps at all times.  That would result in lower average players per map though and might worsen the karma train effect by making it easier for blobs to avoid one another as they mowed down undefended objectives. In a sense this is the current situation, in order to avoid queues they have added additional maps by creating more matches/tiers, and as we can see this has resulted in poor quality play on underpopulated maps during non-peak hours.