[POLL] What do you think is the best schedule for World Recreations?

[XenesisII.1540]

In light of this new WR update today, WR will be on a 4 week recreation schedule instead of the 8 weeks used for relinks, due to not having transfers available to begin with.

Keep in mind this will be a temporary measure to compensate for the transfer delay along with alliances for post release of World Restructuring. Recreations may go back to 8 weeks once transfers have been implemented again.

What do you think about the 4 weeks? good? or should it be more or less?

 

 

 

Edited November 24 by XenesisII.1540

[TheGrimm.5624]

Devil is in the details. I would say there are three wildcards in play though. Transfers, Initial placement algorithm, time zones. 

First off, I like the no transfer bit. That said its rough on a given player if something goes wrong and the sort logic separates them from their guild. But it's also what partially what created some of the server imbalance over time. This would almost make me question if 2 weeks during debugging would make more sense. But note the next section.

Even during normal relinks we have seen whatever logic is used to place a new pairing into a tiers can be way off and it takes up to 4 weeks for servers to actual make it to the tier that they should be in. So with a 4 week or less grouping we could end up with imbalance if the initial tier placements are way off. So though the sort might be good, it might still create matches that are way off the mark which discourages people to the system. So short windows may not allow players to actually see how the sorting balance worked. Any guild that is not larger or part of a community guild may be seeing more chaos after each sort since they will now be with others that are used to seeing during their normal game play time. Shorter windows don't allow guilds to interact enough to know they should support this group and/or avoid that one due to the tactics/playstyle they employ.

Timezone or time of play has been a missing attribute before and could spell imbalance from the start of the idea of the WR. If this is now in the logic, have we seen it tested? If not then it would make sense for shorter time  groupings so that logic in itself can be better tested and refined.

 

[XenesisII.1540]

16 minutes ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

Devil is in the details. I would say there are three wildcards in play though. Transfers, Initial placement algorithm, time zones. 

First off, I like the no transfer bit. That said its rough on a given player if something goes wrong and the sort logic separates them from their guild. But it's also what partially what created some of the server imbalance over time. This would almost make me question if 2 weeks during debugging would make more sense. But note the next section.

Even during normal relinks we have seen whatever logic is used to place a new pairing into a tiers can be way off and it takes up to 4 weeks for servers to actual make it to the tier that they should be in. So with a 4 week or less grouping we could end up with imbalance if the initial tier placements are way off. So though the sort might be good, it might still create matches that are way off the mark which discourages people to the system. So short windows may not allow players to actually see how the sorting balance worked. Any guild that is not larger or part of a community guild may be seeing more chaos after each sort since they will now be with others that are used to seeing during their normal game play time. Shorter windows don't allow guilds to interact enough to know they should support this group and/or avoid that one due to the tactics/playstyle they employ.

Timezone or time of play has been a missing attribute before and could spell imbalance from the start of the idea of the WR. If this is now in the logic, have we seen it tested? If not then it would make sense for shorter time  groupings so that logic in itself can be better tested and refined.

New relinks seem to rely on some weird glicko matching, which is why sometimes you get the funky BG placement in T3 when they should  at least be T2 or 1. And then you have links that become host but their glicko is low so they're dumped in lower tiers at first, or some come from a high tier but now have a low ppt link and need to drop a few tiers.

On world recreations they can't really rely on previous world performance information since the entire world is being shuffled, so I assume anything to do with tier placements and glickos and whatever else in relation to that is out the window. It will be entirely random placement into initial matches, and since worlds are suppose to be much more equally matched per player activity and now time zones, previous world information shouldn't matter.

I just hope this change does not help promote a certain mentality, well my world is garbage so who cares we're not helping anyone, we're shuffled in 4 weeks anyways. "Winning" is suppose to be the glue to drive players for something to do together as a server/world, but that's a missing factor still.

Edited November 17 by XenesisII.1540

[Stand The Wall.6987]

nvm

Edited November 17 by Stand The Wall.6987

[TheGrimm.5624]

7 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

I just hope this change does not help promote a certain mentality, well my world is garbage so who cares we're not helping anyone, we're shuffled in 4 weeks anyways. "Winning" is suppose to be the glue to drive players for something to do together as a server/world, but that's a missing factor still.

^^^ This. You hit it on the head here. I am mental in I don't like to lose our stuff. But during the betas I even got that, 'it doesn't matter why try' feel that was a serious turn off during the betas. Our to me implies seeing familiar faces over time and when the scramble effect happened and didn't see as many server mates didn't really feel the need to play those weeks as much. Now peoples' mileage will vary here I agree but it was a noticeable impact personally.

[TheGrimm.5624]

15 minutes ago, Stand The Wall.6987 said:

like i said in the other thread being stuck in a matchup that you can't win is going to make it seem like WR didn't fix anything, so reshuffling more often is a good thing. also its nice to fight new ppl in general

Shorter windows in the beginning could help people connect with others as well to form up community guild groups. You need those guild groupings one both sides as in people you are familiar with fighting with and fighting against. Recognizable frenemies that creates competition between groups keeps the fights fresh as well. Server linking's have been good in allowing people to cross the fence and remind people it is a game and laugh together about previous encounters and shorter windows might help people reconnect after a scramble if they want to group up with others.

[XenesisII.1540]

8 minutes ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

^^^ This. You hit it on the head here. I am mental in I don't like to lose our stuff. But during the betas I even got that, 'it doesn't matter why try' feel that was a serious turn off during the betas. Our to me implies seeing familiar faces over time and when the scramble effect happened and didn't see as many server mates didn't really feel the need to play those weeks as much. Now peoples' mileage will vary here I agree but it was a noticeable impact personally.

I dunno grim even in our regular matches I don't really care if we lose something. Like the other night we lost a t3 bay cause a guild wiped to indo once and then left the map. What can you do after that? nothing but shrug and recap and move on. 🤷‍♂️

Let's keep in mind too that the betas have mostly only been one week, so naturally people aren't going to care as much, we get the same effect on every relink week, it doesn't matter cause links will happen and tiers will be shuffled, so win lose or draw it makes no difference that week. Then people get back to semi caring for the next 7 weeks, depending how much the links suck anyways.

I only have one purpose these days, pulling people off stuff, nothing else, even rewards, matter anymore.

[TheGrimm.5624]

2 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

I dunno grim even in our regular matches I don't really care if we lose something. Like the other night we lost a t3 bay cause a guild wiped to indo once and then left the map. What can you do after that? nothing but shrug and recap and move on. 🤷‍♂️

Let's keep in mind too that the betas have mostly only been one week, so naturally people aren't going to care as much, we get the same effect on every relink week, it doesn't matter cause links will happen and tiers will be shuffled, so win lose or draw it makes no difference that week. Then people get back to semi caring for the next 7 weeks, depending how much the links suck anyways.

I only have one purpose these days, pulling people off stuff, nothing else, even rewards, matter anymore.

lol, As I said, I know I am mental. Even my guild jokes me when I might spend up to an hour building a defense and then there are no defenders though the attack could have been pushed off easily. Old school habits remain.

[blp.3489]

2 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Keep in mind this will be a temporary measure to compensate for the transfer delay along with alliances for post release of World Restructuring. Recreations may go back to 8 weeks once transfers have been implemented again.

Did they say somewhere along the line that there would be transfers other than via changing guilds?  Given all the problems associated with transfers I'm not sure I see the desirability of anything more than changing guilds so you are moved the next time teams are generated.  I do see that waiting 8 weeks to change which guild you are playing with is a bit of a long time, but doesn't it take about 4 weeks just for the 1up/1down process to sort teams into tiers?  I guess in a perfect world the teams would be so perfectly balanced that sorting into tiers isn't that big a deal, but it remains to be seen how well balance will be achieved.

[XenesisII.1540]

19 minutes ago, blp.3489 said:

Did they say somewhere along the line that there would be transfers other than via changing guilds?

What’s Been Postponed?

To achieve our goal of getting World Restructuring into a 24/7 beta state, we’re postponing development on the following features for the initial release of World Restructuring, although they’re on our list for possible future improvements.

Team Transfers: Once a match has started, there will not be a way for a player to initiate a transfer between teams. Players will need to wait until the next team-creation event or season to be placed with a different guild. To help mitigate this in the short term, we’ll be reducing the duration of a season from eight weeks to four weeks.

[Dawdler.8521]

38 minutes ago, blp.3489 said:

but doesn't it take about 4 weeks just for the 1up/1down process to sort teams into tiers?

Tiers wont mean anything under WR even if they are still there. If you cant "reach" T1 from T5 despite winning 4 times in a row, what do you loose? Absolutely nothing. What do you win? Absolutely nothing. You're going to be in a random tier after 4 weeks regardless. Even with 8 weeks, it's the same thing. The core of "competetive" WvW isnt tiers, it's the 24/7 fight and week to week matchups.

The only thing the tier system does today is create a rich vs poor scenario of being stuck on a world. You're either bouncing around down in the shitter or high enough where you get rewarded with an easier fight for loosing just so you can go back up. 

It's pretty stupid if you think about it.

[CrimsonOneThree.5682]

They said matches would be 4 weeks, which is fine by me, with transfers locked, until a period of time, between 'seasons'.

Inbetween that period, I wonder how long the window to transfer will be.

Edited November 18 by CrimsonOneThree.5682

[blp.3489]

2 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

What’s Been Postponed?

To achieve our goal of getting World Restructuring into a 24/7 beta state, we’re postponing development on the following features for the initial release of World Restructuring, although they’re on our list for possible future improvements.

(emphasis added by me).

I for one will be hoping that they will realize that team transfers are the root of some of the biggest and most intractable problems we have, and decide not to ever implement them.  I'm not really sure what the compelling legitimate use case for unrestricted transfers is.  I can see where if you are new and want to join to play with some friends then you should be able to join their guild prior to first entering wvw and get placed with them, that might help with recruiting new players.  If you are an existing player I don't think you should be able to specify what team you get transferred to.  There could be an option where you and the people you so desperately want to play with collectively create a new guild and the guild members are transferred together to a team that the team building algorithm picks.  Of course that team is likely to be one of the lower performing teams in order to promote balance.

2 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

The core of "competetive" WvW isnt tiers, it's the 24/7 fight and week to week matchups.

I was thinking of tiers as a system for moving teams into more closely matched matches rather than as a competition to reach the top tiers.  As I said, we can hope that the teams will be so well balanced that the one up/one down system just shuffles teams to provide variety in matches, but I was thinking of the issues with the current system where uneven teams get randomly matched up and the one up/one down system shuffles teams into hopefully more even matches.  I'm guessing that the team building algorithm will be far from perfect and that there will be lopsided matches that will get shuffled into more even matches, and that too short of a season might not optimize the overall evenness of matches.

Actually, one of the more interesting things to see will be how much "dynamic" balancing occurs.  If a guild has never participated in wvw starts participating half way through a season, will the team get assigned at that point in time or will all guilds be somehow assigned teams at the start of the season even if they have never participated?  Likewise for individuals without guilds.  Depending on how dynamic participation is there seems to be a lot of room for updating the teams during the season as new players and/or guilds start playing, thereby improving balance within seasons.

I haven't seen any mention that they intend to do anything like this, but, there is also the potential for the team building algorithm to be somewhat incremental in rebuilding teams, i.e. maintain some fraction of the team intact from season to season and only shuffle the remaining fraction, in order to provide more continuity.  Depending on the portion of the player base that has a guild, for example, you might only shuffle the players that aren't in guilds, or only the individuals and guilds smaller than a certain size in terms of player hours.  Or you could randomly pick a certain fraction of the players/guilds.

[SweetPotato.7456]

Since the announcements, and knowing we aren't getting Alliance, instead will be push into beta permanently, I'd say weekly reset is the best, reason is the new systems will be very , well you all know how it felt, very isolated, don't know half the people you see only the map. Not sure how to run with them, etc rather than letting people warm up half way @4 weeks better to just brutally cut all ties weekly.

On a side note: I think a weekly reset would make the guild have stronger bonds, it would make players want to play more if you introduce completing 4 WvW weeks with the same guild to get a Monthly WvW reward chests and an achievement title that continues onwards. I am thinking ahead, let's not kid ourselves that players are going to stick to one Guild, surely there will be some kind of disruption now that transferring to another server will be render moot.

 

Give us that extra guild slots please.

 

Edited November 18 by SweetPotato.7456

[Dawdler.8521]

4 hours ago, blp.3489 said:

.Actually, one of the more interesting things to see will be how much "dynamic" balancing occurs.  If a guild has never participated in wvw starts participating half way through a season, will the team get assigned at that point in time or will all guilds be somehow assigned teams at the start of the season even if they have never participated?  Likewise for individuals without guilds. 

Same thing as mentioned to people in the other thread that seems to have forgotten the betas and everything Anet has said so far about WR - we know how this works.

You leave you old guild. You join a new guild. You set it as your new WvW guild mid season. Absolutely nothing happens because you are still assigned to a team for 1-4 weeks. At the reshuffle, you get sorted with your active WvW guild.

People without guilds just skip the first step.

The “empty assignment” of guilds is irrelevant (ie if 0 of 50 have it selected as their WvW guild) since the above always apply. Even if you create a new guild mid season it’s the same thing. On the lowest level it’s the players that are assigned to a team, not the guild. The guild is only a container used while reshuffling.

TL;DR stop thinking from the guild side of things first.

[Riba.3271]

There are 2 viable choices:

1) Every week. It will be proper fair matchmaking gamemode. Unfortunately score will be just fluff, but this applies to any system where servers aren't at least semi-permanent. Probably will lead to death of WvW as only people who will still play are people who tag up when enemy already has a commander, but that is clearly main goal of destructuring anyways.

2) Very rarely (6+ months or never). Community based WvW where you train the pugs, promote voice comm adress, share builds and try to fix your servers problems. Any shorter timeframe will just make it impossible to get decent amount of people outside your initial group on same page and voice comms.

[Mabi black.1824]

13 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

I just hope this change does not help promote a certain mentality, well my world is garbage so who cares we're not helping anyone, we're shuffled in 4 weeks anyways. "Winning" is suppose to be the glue to drive players for something to do together as a server/world, but that's a missing factor still.

Dear Xenesisll, how do you have that hope? What are you basing that hope on? Or you're just lying to yourself and all of us here. What you have described is unavoidable. We have literally filled pages and pages about this inevitable problem or consequence (call it what you will)

This change is truly a profound change. As Rubi wanted to point out/remind us, we are going there with the aim of ''solving the imbalances of the population and getting big matches''.

While we have understood better and better how they have chosen to solve the first part of this goal, the second part has been completely missing (until now). The choice was to empty the ''server'' as a reference/design/purpose of this game mode, so it should be natural to build a new design, a new context capable of engaging players, week after week both when it wins and when it loses, so as to make the matches ''big matches''.

My very personal feeling is that the development thought ''let's start giving balanced games to our guys from WVW, then we'll think about everything else''. whereas I think it would have been better to do the opposite. and most importantly share that ''everything else'' with the community about what/how it might be.

Edited November 18 by Mabi black.1824

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, Riba.3271 said:

There are 2 viable choices:

1) Every week. It will be proper fair matchmaking gamemode. Unfortunately score will be just fluff, but this applies to any system where servers aren't at least semi-permanent. Probably will lead to death of WvW as only people who will still play are people who tag up when enemy already has a commander, but that is clearly main goal of destructuring anyways.

2) Very rarely (6+ months or never). Community based WvW where you train the pugs, promote voice comm adress, share builds and try to fix your servers problems. Any shorter timeframe will just make it impossible to get decent amount of people outside your initial group on same page and voice comms.

You've never heard of the idea of a compromise in between two extremes that only the few will like, huh?

[Cyninja.2954]

13 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

I just hope this change does not help promote a certain mentality, well my world is garbage so who cares we're not helping anyone, we're shuffled in 4 weeks anyways. "Winning" is suppose to be the glue to drive players for something to do together as a server/world, but that's a missing factor still.

Winning hasn't been the glue that motivates players in this mode for a long time. It's shifted to: loot per minute and what type of content do I want, ages ago.

What type of content was defined by which tier do you want to be in (and then manipulating matches as best possible) or via stacking on servers (or the intentional un-stacking in the past, when "fight guilds" would intentionally leaves overstacked servers. Less common with the blob guilds and mentality more present today).

What do players currently "win" exactly? The prestige of being in a higher tier, which as we know is primarily dependent on coverage and population, the k/d, the ppt score? Winning is meaningless in this mode as is. With the changes to player distribution this might finally be addressed.

The biggest changes are coming to players which are not committed to a guild or social structure. Those are the ones which will face the most randomness in regards to their experience. Here the question becomes primarily: will a random player entering WvW find content and a decent experience more or less than now?

As to time frame, 4 weeks initially to be able to sort out the kinks and issues the new system has. Even a weekly switch up might work for the first few weeks. Common sense dictates that being able to implement many changes in a short amount of time would allow for the fastest solving of arising issues (if the developer resource are present to back up this approach). Otherwise a 2 month or even 3 month cycle (quarterly) would work as to allow guilds and elements of a world to adapt to each other. Anything longer and we are running into similar issues that a server system has. This is highly dependent on outside factors though, some of which are not a the developers control or lie outside the game mode:

- overall player activity. This is highly driven by time of year and content releases for the game overall

- reward structures

- language barriers, especially on EU.

- transfer possibilities after initial world creation

All of these things needs addressing down the road and ideally would get taken into account within the new system. It should be flexible enough to adapt though, unlike fixed servers.

Edited November 18 by Cyninja.2954

[Riba.3271]

14 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

You've never heard of the idea of a compromise in between two extremes that only the few will like, huh?

Well, current and currently proposed destructuring system have problems with the fact that playing for points or trying to organise your server is meaningless. So might as well go optimal matchmaking, so every 1 week with no transfers. Isn't that the whole purpose of destructuring anyways?

Edited November 18 by Riba.3271

[Cyninja.2954]

11 minutes ago, Riba.3271 said:

Well, current and currently proposed destructuring system have problems with the fact that playing for points or trying to organise your server is meaningless. So might as well go optimal matchmaking, so every 1 week with no transfers. Isn't that the whole purpose of destructuring anyways?

The current system is being reworked due to player behavior, which goes completely contrary to what you claim, lack of flexibility of the system to engage with this player behavior and the resulting deterioration of the mode.

It in fact has little to nothing to do with player organization, unless you consider server stacking organization. In fact, the new system will ask for far more player organization, which is one of the big risk which come with it.

[Riba.3271]

17 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

31 minutes ago, Riba.3271 said:

Well, current and currently proposed destructuring system have problems with the fact that playing for points or trying to organise your server is meaningless. So might as well go optimal matchmaking, so every 1 week with no transfers. Isn't that the whole purpose of destructuring anyways?

The current system is being reworked due to player behavior, which goes completely contrary to what you claim, lack of flexibility of the system to engage with this player behavior and the resulting deterioration of the mode.

It in fact has little to nothing to do with player organization, unless you consider server stacking organization. In fact, the new system will ask for far more player organization, which is one of the big risk which come with it.

So after devs change the system in following ways:

- All server linkings are open until there are Full + Full server. So even if linking outnumbers all other linkings, they're still open

and

- Transferring to almost everywhere costs 500 gems. In addition to increased income in WvW

then the fault is within "player behaviour" and that is what should be corrected, not the population/transfer system itself?

Edited November 18 by Riba.3271

[Cyninja.2954]

1 minute ago, Riba.3271 said:

So after devs change the system in following ways:

- All server linkings are open until there are Full + Full server. So even if linking outnumbers all other linkings, they're still open

and

- Transferring to almost everywhere costs 500 gems. In addition to increased income in WvW

then the fault is within "player behaviour" and that is what should be corrected, not the population/transfer system itself?

You have no idea what "full" means given it can be 1 player above or 500 players above the threshold. You should know that as veteran.

The transfer system IS also at fault, but players abusing it is on players themselves.

Sure, other approaches could have worked nicely. I fail to recall the widespread suggestions for those from the  players which disagree with the world restructuring. Whining over spilled milk hardly makes sense now. World restructuring is coming and now that the developers are actually able to pull it off you have 3 choices: keep whining, adapt or leave.

[blp.3489]

8 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

The “empty assignment” of guilds is irrelevant (ie if 0 of 50 have it selected as their WvW guild) since the above always apply. Even if you create a new guild mid season it’s the same thing. On the lowest level it’s the players that are assigned to a team, not the guild. The guild is only a container used while reshuffling.

TL;DR stop thinking from the guild side of things first.

You have a point.  But... 😁  Are all 12 million or whatever players going to be assigned to teams regardless of whether they have ever played wvw?  If not, will they be assigned a team when they first enter wvw, even if it is mid-season?

It is unlikely to be common, but what about a guild made up of players that have never played wvw but have set their wvw guild?  Will that guild be assigned to a team at start of season?

[blp.3489]

8 hours ago, Riba.3271 said:

There are 2 viable choices:

1) Every week. It will be proper fair matchmaking gamemode. Unfortunately score will be just fluff, but this applies to any system where servers aren't at least semi-permanent. Probably will lead to death of WvW as only people who will still play are people who tag up when enemy already has a commander, but that is clearly main goal of destructuring anyways.

2) Very rarely (6+ months or never). Community based WvW where you train the pugs, promote voice comm adress, share builds and try to fix your servers problems. Any shorter timeframe will just make it impossible to get decent amount of people outside your initial group on same page and voice comms.

Can you not just substitute "guild" for "server" and work on organizing your guild, including recruiting players - perhaps especially from your current team, and help with training the guild members?  All the results of your efforts with your guild will still be with you after the next round of team making.  With up to 500 players per guild there is a lot of room for building up a group, you probably wouldn't be able to work with more than 500 members of your server anyway.