Population doesn't seem to be balanced

[meerfunkuhtron.9725]

I waited to play through the whole weekend to get a better feel of the population. I played at different hours of the day as well for this purpose. And I can say that, so far, it seems like population between teams are not balanced correctly.

I'm in a Red team. On reset night, we had queues galore (as expected) yet we had the outnumbered state the whole time. We essentially couldn't hold any of our structures in our home BL until one of the enemy teams stopped fighting us. Saturday was close to the same, on all maps. Sunday was the calmest day and we were able to tier up all our keeps, which we lost in less than hour (save for Stoic/Garri).

Essentially, based on our experience so far, our population is far lower than the others. The one time we were able to actually defend our borderlands or even fight back was when our enemy's zergs were about the same size as ours, and it's because it was 10 AM on a Sunday morning in NA. What seems to be the enemy's LOWEST point in their population... was the only time we found ourselves at an equal footing.

Which to me says that your system for balancing population isn't working well, at least for the match-up I'm on.

Other feedback:
-The time you provided for choosing WvW teams did not specify whether it's 11:59 AM or PM. If it was AM, then other people who thought otherwise probably chose their guild too late.
-It's probably good to have an in-game notification that people should choose their preferred guild within a set time frame. People who don't visit other sites and just play the game wouldn't have known to do this crucial thing.
-I am not convinced this is a good way to cultivate community in this game mode. Obviously time can change that perspective, but how this is set up and implemented has so far only fragmented the communities we've had. If you plan on reshuffling team composition every X interval, then I'm definitely far less convinced this WR will fulfill what you say it will (especially since the ability to choose who you can be teamed up with outside of creating a mega guild is out of the question at this time).
-Lag and connection issues. I am not sure your environments can handle the high populations.

That's my feedback for now. I think I'll just edit this post if I can think of more as the beta continues.

[Arya Whitefire.8423]

I think anet has not really considered how their large guild size + off hours guilds interacts with how worlds are built.  Basically any world, that is built, which includes a large guild that plays many hours during off hours, will pretty much by design be a world that outnumbers other worlds during the times this guild covers, and be outnumbered during prime time.

It would likely work a lot better if the guild size was 200 players or less.

Edited January 16 by Arya Whitefire.8423
grammer fix

[TheGrimm.5624]

Doing similar testing agree the algorithm that is balancing time of play and numbers seem off. Community guilds (aka the pho Alliance system) versus similar sized Guilds also may need separate sorts since it so far ends up with vast times of outnumbered on various maps. Anet not sharing sort info only leads to open questions and assumptions here. Initial placement remains in a bad state, which is fair based on whatever they use as attributes to define that but impacts the quality of the matchup. But again part of a multiweek match up is to help test this so I get that.

[RisingDawn.5796]

It feels like, little progress was made honestly.

Edited January 16 by RisingDawn.5796

[Mabi black.1824]

2 hours ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

Anet not sharing sort info only leads to open questions and assumptions here.

True, we have no idea if they're testing redistribution alone (to ensure you stay with your friends) or if they're testing a balanced distribution as well. mystery.

[Chaba.5410]

4 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

True, we have no idea if they're testing redistribution alone (to ensure you stay with your friends) or if they're testing a balanced distribution as well. mystery.

All we know is that they're testing "The latest iteration of our team-building algorithm" and have no idea what is included in that iteration.  Clearly it bugged though. xD

[XenesisII.1540]

On 1/15/2024 at 4:44 PM, meerfunkuhtron.9725 said:

I waited to play through the whole weekend to get a better feel of the population. I played at different hours of the day as well for this purpose. And I can say that, so far, it seems like population between teams are not balanced correctly.

I'm in a Red team. On reset night, we had queues galore (as expected) yet we had the outnumbered state the whole time. We essentially couldn't hold any of our structures in our home BL until one of the enemy teams stopped fighting us. Saturday was close to the same, on all maps. Sunday was the calmest day and we were able to tier up all our keeps, which we lost in less than hour (save for Stoic/Garri).

Essentially, based on our experience so far, our population is far lower than the others. The one time we were able to actually defend our borderlands or even fight back was when our enemy's zergs were about the same size as ours, and it's because it was 10 AM on a Sunday morning in NA. What seems to be the enemy's LOWEST point in their population... was the only time we found ourselves at an equal footing.

I just want to note something here.

On reset for homebl you will typically be outnumbered considering you're fighting against two other equal sides trying to take your stuff, and they're less interested in each other, unlike ebg which is equal footing for all sides with smc being the biggest beacon that pulls players away from your side, so less stress on defense, while on homebl the keeps are the smc beacon.

On homebl you need to try and distract and lead teams into each other, in a setting where all sides have map queues you should expect to lose objectives as you cannot be at two places at once for the most part, especially when working with paper structures with no defenses in place. 

Desert is also on another level of hard to defend with how much bigger than map is compared alpines due to the verticality of it, but you can use the shrines for ports if you own them for faster travel, this is where roamers are important to have around. Also it's harder to scout for, unless you were already sitting there when the enemy shows up.

That's not say there isn't a problem with the population sorting, because there definitely is and I'm not even sure if the time zone sorting is even working properly either. Just saying this is kinda the typical experience you would find on a homebl because of it's design, and why frankly WR doesn't really change what happens in the game, despite getting 1% of activity time matching instead of like 13% gap.

[meerfunkuhtron.9725]

On 1/16/2024 at 2:59 PM, XenesisII.1540 said:

I just want to note something here.

On reset for homebl you will typically be outnumbered considering you're fighting against two other equal sides trying to take your stuff, and they're less interested in each other, unlike ebg which is equal footing for all sides with smc being the biggest beacon that pulls players away from your side, so less stress on defense, while on homebl the keeps are the smc beacon.

On homebl you need to try and distract and lead teams into each other, in a setting where all sides have map queues you should expect to lose objectives as you cannot be at two places at once for the most part, especially when working with paper structures with no defenses in place. 

Desert is also on another level of hard to defend with how much bigger than map is compared alpines due to the verticality of it, but you can use the shrines for ports if you own them for faster travel, this is where roamers are important to have around. Also it's harder to scout for, unless you were already sitting there when the enemy shows up.

That's not say there isn't a problem with the population sorting, because there definitely is and I'm not even sure if the time zone sorting is even working properly either. Just saying this is kinda the typical experience you would find on a homebl because of it's design, and why frankly WR doesn't really change what happens in the game, despite getting 1% of activity time matching instead of like 13% gap.

I understand that reset nights on home bl's tend to suck for reasons you mentioned. I included that part to emphasize that it didn't change even in the following days (including up to now).

[meerfunkuhtron.9725]

Coming back here to add since it's been more days since my initial feedback.
I can only say that my thoughts have grown worse, as I've noticed more issues with this type of system.

On top of populations not being balanced at all, there's an issue in terms of gameplay. People play WvW in different ways: you've got people who just likes to zerg with big numbers, there are those who like to defend while others do not, etc. etc. I want to emphasize that I feel this is fine. It's nice to give people options so they're able to find what suits them most.

What worked with having servers is that people are able to find a place wherein their playstyle is complementary to the way others played. This guild/teams system gets rid of that because, even though my guild matches my playstyle in general, the rest of the people in our team do not. My guild (as well as most others out there, I imagine) can't be on 24/7. When they're not on, my enjoyment of the game decreases drastically as the people I'm playing with feel like they're playing a different game mode altogether. Obviously this wasn't an issue with servers, since the server naturally fostered a certain kind of understanding between its players. My gameplay wasn't hampered by the absence of my guild in the way that this WR system does.
An easy example is the difference between players who care about defending and those who do not - I belong to the former group. Regardless of the number of people I'm surrounded with, if they quite literally won't respond/help with defense because it's not how they play, then what am I left with? (A bad time, is what.)

We saw this happen already with the world linking. Some servers or guilds would literally stop playing for the duration of their match up because they're paired with another that they don't get along with for a variety of reasons - an important one being a mismatch in playstyles. Or, they just leave the match-up to find a better one.

Removing our abilities to choose our own teams really makes this gamemode unenjoyable for a lot of people. Which, I mean, what's the point of a game if not foremost for the sake of enjoyment?

I don't think this system works without alliances.

Edited January 18 by meerfunkuhtron.9725

[Gotejjeken.1267]

I've said it elsewhere, but the beta is tainted because of rush events and bonus xp events, so population is going to be very weird.  

But overall, I don't understand how they thought introducing a system with more entropy than the last would make more stable matchups.  

To me, basing around guilds themselves instead of merely active population / time zones is asking for trouble.  Mostly for reasons OP mentions, but also becaus if this whole thing fails--they probably will just blame the players for not organizing themselves enough.  That's...kind of icky to me.  

[XenesisII.1540]

Don't think any of the betas have had any semblance of balanced populations. They said activity times %'s are near equal in the first one, but overall that doesn't mean much. A person spending 3 hours afk farming camps for pips compared to a person legit playing for 3 hours doing a little bit of everything is not comparable output, we don't even know if they added weights to everyone's value based on their performance in wvw, other than maybe commanding.

Guilds are suppose to be the winners in this system in that their members from any server will be able to join them, only they screwed that up too and a quarter the player base at this point probably needed manual transfers, which then screwed up balance a bit more on those worlds. Along with call of war bringing in the fly by night pve temps to wvw.

Overall the system doesn't seem that big of an improvement over the old system, at the cost of a lot of extra mess to deal with. Matches still suffer with the usual outnumbered with coverage problems and and blobs farming maps, not even sure if every world even has at least one legit full competitive alliance on them. The T4 match has k/d of 1.5, 0.9, 0.6, pretty laughable and looks exactly like a regular match.

So the beta is really just a preview of how the old matches look like when you dump every server into the washing machine and everything comes out pink and shrunk and socks missing somehow.

🤷‍♂️🍦

[Dawdler.8521]

People seem to forget absolute balancing in a perfect world does not exist, WR is a chance to make it so. A reset shuffle to change that chance for everyone, to break up anything that is “stuck”(ie bandwagon worlds winning every matchup, T5 that’s going nowhere for 6+ months).

A 50 vs 50 can still be a complete roflstomp for one side. It can even be a perfectly even fight with both sides doing good in the fighting and still one loose almost every time. When a third side is taken into account, it gets exponentially more difficult to judge.

[XenesisII.1540]

1 minute ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

People seem to forget absolute balancing in a perfect world does not exist, WR is a chance to make it so. A reset shuffle to change that chance for everyone, to break up anything that is “stuck”(ie bandwagon worlds winning every matchup, T5 that’s going nowhere for 6+ months).

A 50 vs 50 can still be a complete roflstomp for one side. It can even be a perfectly even fight with both sides doing good in the fighting and still one loose almost every time. When a third side is taken into account, it gets exponentially more difficult to judge.

Absolute balance is obviously not possible.

But the scenarios you mention already happen in the current system, so again what use is WR then, it really just comes down to reshuffle singles to try and make population more balanced, but really doesn't accomplish much when these in game factors will still happen at pretty much the same frequency because the same big bandwagon groups are involved. Sure maybe it helps a T5 server from not being stuck in T5 for 6 months... but it's still possible to have a T5 quality server anyways by the looks of it because they lost the "get any of the good alliances" roll. Sure maybe it's only a month, but you could also fix that too in the link system by giving that T5 a decent link. 🤭

[meerfunkuhtron.9725]

3 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

People seem to forget absolute balancing in a perfect world does not exist, WR is a chance to make it so. A reset shuffle to change that chance for everyone, to break up anything that is “stuck”(ie bandwagon worlds winning every matchup, T5 that’s going nowhere for 6+ months).

A 50 vs 50 can still be a complete roflstomp for one side. It can even be a perfectly even fight with both sides doing good in the fighting and still one loose almost every time. When a third side is taken into account, it gets exponentially more difficult to judge.

I...

Ok. First off, no one's asking for an absolutely perfect balance. Sometimes I feel like you read these posts and honestly think people are just stupid?
I made this feedback based on several days of gameplay, not just during reset when things are already typically chaotic as expected. What was not expected was how, all the way up to now, it continues to be extremely and perfectly clear to everyone involved in this match-up that the populations are heavily unbalanced. And since population balance is the entire point of this beta (and WR as a whole), it might be important to let them know that the system isn't giving the expected results, no?

 

3 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

But the scenarios you mention already happen in the current system, so again what use is WR then, it really just comes down to reshuffle singles to try and make population more balanced, but really doesn't accomplish much when these in game factors will still happen at pretty much the same frequency because the same big bandwagon groups are involved.

5 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Overall the system doesn't seem that big of an improvement over the old system, at the cost of a lot of extra mess to deal with.

^All of this. WR doesn't prevent the things that've lead to our current issues in the first place, while making the system even more convoluted.

Is there truly no possible way to rebalance populations while keeping the servers system? I mean, we can still have a restructuring.

An idea I've had is to decouple everyone from their current servers, scrapping said old servers and introduce new ones. They should have a good idea how many servers are needed per region, right? So if they do it correctly, we'll end up with enough servers to accommodate current populations with room for newcomers.
We all choose the server we want like we used to back then, including being able to see info on how high or low each server's population is. Servers are closed as they become full. Pretty similar to what we've done before. However, once this is all done and all servers meet proper population thresholds, they are all then closed from any transfers, then the match-ups begin. Once a month, servers can be opened up so people can move to other servers if they want to (with a fee?) while keeping the full servers closed from any incoming transfers. Since populations tend to fluctuate, this type of restructuring would need to be done again when populations start becoming heavily skewed (sans having to introduce completely new servers unless needed), but I doubt it's something we'd have to do on a monthly basis. It might feel less chaotic than what they plan to do with WR, which would be a constant reshuffling of guilds to new teams. 

Edited January 18 by meerfunkuhtron.9725

[One more for the road.8950]

4 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Absolute balance is obviously not possible.

But the scenarios you mention already happen in the current system, so again what use is WR then, it really just comes down to reshuffle singles to try and make population more balanced, but really doesn't accomplish much when these in game factors will still happen at pretty much the same frequency because the same big bandwagon groups are involved. Sure maybe it helps a T5 server from not being stuck in T5 for 6 months... but it's still possible to have a T5 quality server anyways by the looks of it because they lost the "get any of the good alliances" roll. Sure maybe it's only a month, but you could also fix that too in the link system by giving that T5 a decent link. 🤭

One of the differences in the new system would be that if there was indeed a 50 vs 50 roflstomp, there wouldn't be ppl leaving from the ones who got roflstomped to the ones who roflstomps after the fact.

People in general aren't able to police themselves to not run to whoever wins at any point. We have seen that since the link system, people and guilds that keeps moving to the link worlds to be with the strongest host worlds every relink either because host world is full or link world is cheaper to move to and you never know when you gonna change main server with the better people anyway. For a lot of people in EU relinks means keeping an eye on the transfer lists to know where content is gonna end up being, or to know if you are about to face eight weeks of crickets or complaining. I am guessing from what I heard there is some of the same things going on in NA.

Which also means that in current system there ends up being more people on the winning side than the losing side, and some of the people that strongly resists WR are people that want a free ride to that roflstomping side without putting the extra effort in, by, for example, joining a guild. They want the content that the guild creates for the server, but not the commitment. If that means 50 vs 50 roflstomping or a game environment or server society where one shares the same idea of defense or siege bunkering, or maybe even both, people seem to forget that most of those things flavouring a server is first and foremost a guild effort.

With WR there will be more average worlds, and I think it will also shake up some ideas and beliefs about how servers have actually been working. If it's relic ideas and beliefs from before megaservers or later additions.

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, meerfunkuhtron.9725 said:

Ok. First off, no one's asking for an absolutely perfect balance.

But one have to wonder how many of the WR system bad impressions comes from being on 3rd or 2nd place this week. The idea of balance seem to be directly linked to winning.

I mean… would you have made this thread speaking for the loosing team if your team was dominating the matchup? Honestly? They would still have been in the same situation after all.

It sucks to loose but someone have to. That’s the game.

Edited January 18 by Dawdler.8521

[meerfunkuhtron.9725]

Just now, Dawdler.8521 said:

But one have to wonder how many of the WR system bad impressions comes from being on 3rd or 2nd place this week. The idea of balance seem to directly linked to winning.

I mean… would you have made this thread speaking for the loosing team if your team was dominating the matchup? Honestly? They would still have been in the same situation after all.

Uh, yes, I actually would. Because I never played this gamemode for the sake of winning.
I belong to a tiny guild of roamers, within a server that stayed in the lowest set of tiers for years. Never once thought of leaving, because playing tower-defense with people that I liked was what made me enjoy it in the first place and had kept me playing for years.
What this system is doing, as shown by this current beta, is that the way I've enjoyed the game is being disrupted. Why do I care that we're constantly getting swarmed by enemy zergs? Because I enjoy roaming. Why do I care that we're constantly outnumbered? Because I enjoy defending, and defense is thrown out the window when you're fighting numbers too large for you to make a difference.

That was what motivated me to make this post, on top of the glaringly obvious reason of: WR is supposed to balance populations. My match-up shows otherwise. It's therefore important to provide feedback that shows their system isn't bringing about the expected outcome of more balanced populations.

[gashen.3874]

that is the whole problem, they just don,t know how to balance it up.

[XenesisII.1540]

5 hours ago, One more for the road.8950 said:

One of the differences in the new system would be that if there was indeed a 50 vs 50 roflstomp, there wouldn't be ppl leaving from the ones who got roflstomped to the ones who roflstomps after the fact.

People in general aren't able to police themselves to not run to whoever wins at any point. We have seen that since the link system, people and guilds that keeps moving to the link worlds to be with the strongest host worlds every relink either because host world is full or link world is cheaper to move to and you never know when you gonna change main server with the better people anyway. For a lot of people in EU relinks means keeping an eye on the transfer lists to know where content is gonna end up being, or to know if you are about to face eight weeks of crickets or complaining. I am guessing from what I heard there is some of the same things going on in NA.

Well yes and no. Players aren't transferring on a regular basis every time this happens, there's transfer restrictions afterall. There's also the factor that servers that are rotflstomping enemies are usually full servers, so you can't move to them every time, yes you can for their link, but then that means that link server gets bigger and will get a different link next time. What triggers a bandwagon is when guilds decide to move and then other guilds decide to move and all their out of guild followers go with them, this isn't a weekly thing though, it's a two month at minimum thing usually. But now we also have 4 week periods instead, and we could easily curbstomp transfers with a higher cost, it baffles me why they still have 500 cost, instead of going back to a general 1800 cost now.

The bandwagoning isn't something that started with links either, it happened from day one when we had free transfers in place for 6 months, then we had servers buying guilds and getting through the full lock, anet offering free transfers before tournaments, and now in WR we'll have them join up in alliance guilds to easily shove their guilds into the same worlds, something they can't do in the current system for already full worlds.

Then there's the other factor with wvw overall, where more players over the years have converted themselves from ppters to ppkers instead, because again winning as a server means nothing, and this was something that was already happening years before links, these guilds are looking for content, doesn't matter where they find it, on whatever home, as long as it's there, and usually that means in the highest tiers. So it might seem like links encouraged this, but it was already happening in mass before that, it did get encouraged with the lower transfer cost, which anet really should have kept an eye on that effect and raised it back up long ago when we all realized link servers aren't being refilled permanently, they're just being played as hop scotch by guilds.

End of the day I'm not against WR, I'm just playing devils advocate, wondering if WR is worth the mess it brings at this point in time, is it really the solution we still need given the entire state of wvw is in, and yeah sure this should lead to other changes to make winning worth something again, but how many years later? What effects will WR have in the meantime, running players off because they don't want that chaos it brings to communities, as little as we think that might exist today.  We're still not playing to win anything, we're still going to get outnumbered or coverage problems during the match at probably the same frequencies, lack of tags, private guild squads, are all factors that will still affect matches the same ways. We might think we stopped the bandwagons, but really we gave them a free pass, and now we're moving the singles in around them instead.

Is it worth the trouble, I don't know, but we're going to get it anyways because it's near the finish line so people will have to get use to it or quit I guess.

[urd.8306]

On 1/16/2024 at 10:48 AM, RisingDawn.5796 said:

It feels like, little progress was made honestly.

After todays reset on EU it feels like it's exactly what we have with WvW realms. It's nothing more than a re-link of world where some servers are outnumbered while others are stacked.

My expectation was that after week 1 the server would get re-balanced and thrown together based on activity. Instead I'm on a world outnumbered on 3 maps on reset.

[XenesisII.1540]

7 minutes ago, urd.8306 said:

After todays reset on EU it feels like it's exactly what we have with WvW realms. It's nothing more than a re-link of world where some servers are outnumbered while others are stacked.

My expectation was that after week 1 the server would get re-balanced and thrown together based on activity. Instead I'm on a world outnumbered on 3 maps on reset.

That isn't happening until next week jan 26th...

[urd.8306]

So, no reason to play for another week.