New WvW league structure proposal if WR doesn't work out

[Chaba.5410]

Hey @XenesisII.1540, was this you?
"I don’t trust the players to do this properly on their own, even with lower population caps, you open 3 servers and I’m sure one will end up being maxed out with a set of powerhouse guilds, population balance between the 3 would need to be monitored and allowed to grow at an equal pace as well."

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Hypothetically-Speaking-New-Worlds/page/2#post6173758

Cuz I don't trust players to do this properly on their own either.  During the old "server meta" days of buying guilds, some guilds would want to know how queues are and such.  No one wants to take the risk of transferring into a crowded situation.  I knew players who took up the free transfer offer to bottom tier HoD for one of those WvW tournaments because they wanted to have a nice, relaxed and small scale experience.  It turned into the opposite of what they were seeking and they were miserable.  After they transferred, the bandwagon came.  The game gives zero visibility into actual population balance.  Players are making transfer decisions in the blind.

Edited January 16 by Chaba.5410

[BumboJumbo.1308]

World restructuring is much better than whatever these suggestions are (which they're the exact same as servers right now but made fancier to sound different).

[XenesisII.1540]

13 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Hey @XenesisII.1540, was this you?
"I don’t trust the players to do this properly on their own, even with lower population caps, you open 3 servers and I’m sure one will end up being maxed out with a set of powerhouse guilds, population balance between the 3 would need to be monitored and allowed to grow at an equal pace as well."

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Hypothetically-Speaking-New-Worlds/page/2#post6173758

Cuz I don't trust players to do this properly on their own either.  During the old "server meta" days of buying guilds, some guilds would want to know how queues are and such.  No one wants to take the risk of transferring into a crowded situation.  I knew players who took up the free transfer offer to bottom tier HoD for one of those WvW tournaments because they wanted to have a nice, relaxed and small scale experience.  It turned into the opposite of what they were seeking and they were miserable.  After they transferred, the bandwagon came.  The game gives zero visibility into actual population balance.  Players are making transfer decisions in the blind.

Yes that's my main account.

Like I said I don't trust players to police themselves, they haven't in 12 years, and it's laughable whenever anyone thinks they will these days, that's why we need the automated reset of WR. But put them in painful situations like open transfers and they will sort themselves out real quick, no one likes queues, and eotm isn't an option like before until they put skirmish tickets in there. Doesn't look like people want 12 even servers anyways.

The HoD transfer situation was bad because it done right before a tournament, all the transfers anet offered was before tournaments, leaving those servers to be bandwagoned in time to basically hand them the win, another badly executed move by anet to screw up populations.

[Cyninja.2954]

3 hours ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Where are you pulling your data from?  The site I usually uses doesn't appear to be working for the beta.

https://gw2mists.com/matches/eu

still has numbers on match-ups. Some of the data is slewed because it only counts registered users.

[Knighthonor.4061]

1 hour ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Kind of funny reading through those old threads...

"The point of a server is to have everyone contribute so no one guild or group is having to financially support that server alone. Maintaining tiers in WvW gets very costly in both time and money spent to do so, so you want to be in a community where more in that community contribute to accomplishing common goals and the costs of siege and supplies spent to map pin every day in WvW for hours on end and being able to have numerous reliable commanders on from multiple guilds during any hour of the day to call for assistance or to take over if needed so you are not stuck doing everything on a server.

The idea of going to an empty world is not appealing as it places MORE financial burden on your guild and MORE reliability on your guild rather than have more people available at any time of day to have that more evenly distributed."

(Illustration of the free rider problem some of us were discussing...)

stuff like that could have easily been solved long ago, by making siege and other things like it, part of the game mechanics and built/made by game mechanics rather than ingame currency. Just like WoW did with its early Open World Siege zone (forgot the name of it)

[DeWolfe.2174]

19 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

1. Go back to original single servers, 24 NA 27 EU.

2. Open transfers, always,

1. Not enough Population for single servers to run all 4 maps. Keeping links is ok for now.
2. Yes, always keep the worlds open. Let the players figure it out.

[Mabi black.1824]

6 hours ago, Chaba.5410 said:

I believe these are the old discussions Xen is referring to:

Interesting, thanks for bringing it up. We have to say that when Tyler made this suggestion we had no wr. you can't give us new worlds and ask for a spontaneous exodus of players. it's clear that they will tell you no. you do it with wr. provide new server containers with a limit of 1800 players instead of 2500 wr launches and redistribute everyone randomly.

this also seems like the natural change for this mode. we had single servers, then we moved to 2-way paired servers, the next step is 3-way paired servers. even if Tyler even hoped for 4-way servers in 2016. by the time wr is ready to work, you can easily imagine wvw with teams consisting of 3 servers, you would have 0 problems doing it.

if hypothetically we were to go down this path, it remains to be seen how we want to manage transfers during the season.

 

[joneirikb.7506]

On 1/16/2024 at 3:51 AM, XenesisII.1540 said:

1. Go back to original single servers, 24 NA 27 EU.

2. Open transfers, always, all day ever day, on every single server, set to one price 2000 gems, one week transfer and skirmish lockouts remain. If you stack a server and get queues 24 hours that's your problem, not anyone elses. If you super stack a server and absolutely beat up the other servers so you get empty maps to ppt, that's your problem, not anyone elses, transfer off if you want to, it'll cost you 2000 gems.

3. Do a round of 3 day matches like they did back at the start of the game in order to determine initial server ranks.

4. Then start a seasonal mode that lasts one or two months, depends what the players want.

5. Separate the servers into leagues, they will only face servers from those leagues for one or two months.

NA League1 - T1/2,  NA League2 - T3/4/5, NA League3 - T6/7/8.

EU League1 - T1/2/3,  EU League2 - T4/5/6,  EU League3 - T7/8/9.

6. Use 1U1D for the league promotions. After the one or two months for the season, the winning servers will get promoted to the higher league the next season, the losing servers will get demoted, you can apply this to the top/bottom two instead. You can either use points for placements and tally it at the end like the tournaments, or simple have it the last week the top winning server 1ups themselves to the next league, or the lowers 1downs themselves.

7. Add server weekly rewards again.  Winning server every player gets 25 tickets, second place gets 20 tickets, last gets 15 tickets. If your server gets promoted to a higher league, or wins league1 at the end of season you get a bonus of 20 tickets. 😏

8. Add a yearly server loyalty rewards for staying on there for 12 months in a row. Make up server logos after their names and add it to a tabard or cloak or finisher or glider or something.

This is a mixture of glicko with it's glicko walls, and tournament structure. Everyone gets to move where they want, everyone gets their "communities", everyone gets to police themselves, deal with the consequences themselves.

🖖

This is going to be rather all over the place and ranty, sorry.

----

For the actual Original Post:

I personally wouldn't care one way or another. Simply because I don't really care for PPT/PPK or server win/loss/tier, all I care about is playing with my guildies and fighting stuff. We could do that in any system really, even EotM if needed.

(And I'm probably the only player in the game that has no clue what all these rewards are anyway. One of these days I gotta figure out what tickets and pips are, I just know people want them).

But I can easily predict how that entire thing would turn out:
* Couple of good guilds pick a server to build up.
* Hordes/locus swarm of pugs transfers over to that server.
* That server got so much queue's that the guilds can't even get 10 members on map.
* Those guilds get fed up and transfer away to another server to play together.
* Pugs get angry that only queues, no commanders, and "bad server".
* Go to top and repeat.
* Meanwhile this locus swarm will destroy the existing communities on whatever servers they move to.

I'm about 75% sure that it would destroy the existing communities faster than the current linking system would.

----

Some other thoughts, if you take example NA with 24 servers and split them up into single servers and open transfers, then people are going to stack probably 6 servers. That means that the remaining 18 servers are going to be almost entirely empty and still have 4 maps to fill. At this point I'm pretty sure it would be even more empty than the old Tier8 was in NA before the linking system.

Translation, actual dead servers, not just the buzz-word pepople use nowadays when they log on and do not find a Queue and a commander and call it "dead server", but actual dead server as in unable to even play the game-mode.

I'd basically expect the "new" Tier8 to basically be a sPvP match (5vs5) on 4 gigantic maps.

----

For as much as some players hates on WR, the main thing it brings to the game-mode is being dynamic, and lets itself adjust to the total player activity (on a 2 month basis, if they keep 2 month resets).

Linking in theory can adjust itself somewhat, but the bricks are too big to work efficiently.

All the other server ideas/suggestions that players throw out doesn't dynamically adapt at all, and would basically require ANet to sit and delete/create servers manually constantly to keep up with shifting player numbers (pro tip, they won't).

----

Now for a suggestion on how I think you could get the original post to "work".

Cut down the maps from 4 to 1 (EBG only). That might be enough that players would have to spread out if they wanted to actually play. It effectively cuts the effective max size of each server by 1/4, which means we might have enough effective population to fill maps in all single servers.

To compensate, put the other maps in EOTM, and enable Mount/Glider/Rewards (possibly at a slightly lower rate) for EotM maps.

Focuses those that care about server/win/ranking/ppt/ppk etc into a single map (EBG), and let's those that are just after the rewards to get them wherever they want. While also making actual 24/27 single servers be able to spread out and have enough population to actually play the server gameplay.

 

[joneirikb.7506]

Quote

most people just want to log on for their two hours for fights, get rewarded, and then be off, a lot are even clueless of their own server status, they just want a tag to lead them around the map, you can even see them posting how lost they are with the WR beta changes.

When you look at the average player in WvW, and not the hardcore/veterans, I'd completely agree with this. Which means that the most popular way to solve all this for the average majority, would be to just move EBG over to EOTM and enable mount/glider/rewards/pips. That's really it for the average player.

But we also know how much all the Hardcore/Veterans would freak out/get their undies twisted every time someone even suggests the idea.

----

WvW is a game mode that has a broad appeal (sandbox), basically it offers a lot of different things/ways to play and lets players find what they enjoy and play the way they want to. Which also makes it very difficult to change, as every change will directly negatively affect someone.

This has been one of the main problems with most player suggestions over the years, because 99% of them only see things from their own perspective, and doesn't understand why it would negatively impact other players (that enjoy other play-styles and things in the mode). So most of player suggestions would effectively ruin the experience for other players.

And as long as WvW remains a "One shoe fits all" mode, that won't change. Which honestly means that ANet is kind of stuck and can't do much, and player suggestions will generally be more destructive than constructive.

Example, say we went with a majority vote system, how long do you think you'd be able to do Mesmer pulls before they removed that. 😛

----

Now one of the recurring topics in these discussions about servers tends to be an intangible feeling of purpose/drive/pride etc, I mostly sup it up as "Motivation".

Different people have different Motivation (obviously), and it's the most common argument against WR that it would basically destroy their motivation (server community, feeling of belonging, etc). While at the same time others see WR as a Motivation to play again (getting grouped with guild members, population balance, new servers to play against).

This plays right into the above point that the mode has a very broad appeal, and every change to the game will generally negatively impact some part of the player-base. Which again leads to every player-suggestion I've seen so far about population/servers etc always being very "self-centred/egoistical". Basically, I want this change, screw anyone else!

Now when it comes to some minor class-balance, or the usual small changes to the game mode, some egoistical thinking won't cause a big problem. But for things that affect the player-base motivation, it can very quickly escalate and cause a lot of players leaving/abandoning the mode. And this goes both ways, some will read this and thing "Yes, exactly! That's why they should do my idea!" which would just do the exact same thing but the other way, as it would impact a lot of players with a different motivation.

When it comes down to it, if ANet is going to change this (Motivation related changes), they only have two realistic options:

* Leave it as it is (as it at least keeps all the current players playing)
* Change to what the Majority of players prefer (and thus abandon the rest)

Only ANet sits on the numbers of what the majority does/wants (despite how much a lot of players exclaim they're certain they know). If I where to guess then I'd go with my earlier point that I'd expect the "average" wvw player to be chasing only rewards and ignore everything else.

Edited January 17 by joneirikb.7506
(Done wall-of-texting for today)

[XenesisII.1540]

6 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

Some other thoughts, if you take example NA with 24 servers and split them up into single servers and open transfers, then people are going to stack probably 6 servers. That means that the remaining 18 servers are going to be almost entirely empty and still have 4 maps to fill. At this point I'm pretty sure it would be even more empty than the old Tier8 was in NA before the linking system.

Translation, actual dead servers, not just the buzz-word pepople use nowadays when they log on and do not find a Queue and a commander and call it "dead server", but actual dead server as in unable to even play the game-mode.

I'd basically expect the "new" Tier8 to basically be a sPvP match (5vs5) on 4 gigantic maps.

Like I said, people need to feel the pain in order to learn their lessons, because apparently most don't remember what it was like before links, they don't understand why we need a WR system in the first place, or why we needed links in the meantime, and then there's the casuals who don't care about anything but logging on to get their tickets.

[Chaba.5410]

7 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

But I can easily predict how that entire thing would turn out:
* Couple of good guilds pick a server to build up.
* Hordes/locus swarm of pugs transfers over to that server.
* That server got so much queue's that the guilds can't even get 10 members on map.
* Those guilds get fed up and transfer away to another server to play together.
* Pugs get angry that only queues, no commanders, and "bad server".
* Go to top and repeat.
* Meanwhile this locus swarm will destroy the existing communities on whatever servers they move to.

Hehe, almost like you've seen this before.  I *knew* there was something familiar about this script!

xD

[Arya Whitefire.8423]

12 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

But I can easily predict how that entire thing would turn out:
* Couple of good guilds pick a server to build up.
* Hordes/locus swarm of pugs transfers over to that server.
* That server got so much queue's that the guilds can't even get 10 members on map.
* Those guilds get fed up and transfer away to another server to play together.
* Pugs get angry that only queues, no commanders, and "bad server".
* Go to top and repeat.
* Meanwhile this locus swarm will destroy the existing communities on whatever servers they move to.

 

The problem with your scenario started at step 1, players should've never been allowed to stack talent, play time, and organization to start with.  And a WR that has any hope of creating "competitive" matches, will also need to disallow such.  500 player guilds are way too large.  And if the goal is more to be a sandbox, then if anything there should be even more need to disallow stacking.

Edited January 17 by Arya Whitefire.8423

[Dawdler.8521]

4 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Like I said, people need to feel the pain in order to learn their lessons, because apparently most don't remember what it was like before links, they don't understand why we need a WR system in the first place, or why we needed links in the meantime, and then there's the casuals who don't care about anything but logging on to get their tickets.

They probably subconsciously understand it without even realizing it. 

All those wanting to go back to single worlds or somehow make links suddenly work better seem to think that it would magically be balanced at least at one point, which must mean they assume that it would be balanced at the instant it's implemented. So something has to change with the worlds, whether that be merging or splitting them, "encouraging" people to move to other worlds or whatnot. And they also then seem to assume that by doing this something it will forever be balanced, with no further changes to the worlds ever because all the people on them will always be playing with all the other people. 

TL;DR they complain about WR, then suggest WR to balance the worlds, then ignore whats obviously going to happen after a few months and refuse to accept it's going to have to happen again.

[Chaba.5410]

1 hour ago, Arya Whitefire.8423 said:

And a WR that has any hope of creating "competitive" matches, will also need to disallow such.  500 player guilds are way too large. 

Is 500 really too large though?  At one point Anet posted that 500 is about 20-25% of "current worlds".  That was in 2018 or so.  If worlds are really around 2500 players then, being able to stack up to 500 vs. being able to stack up to 2500 (and beyond since PvE players can hop in at any time if they happen to be on a Full world) seems like there a rather large disallowance that WR is introducing.  I suppose that's one of the metrics Anet is going to look into with the data generated from these betas.

Edited January 17 by Chaba.5410

[Arya Whitefire.8423]

24 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Is 500 really too large though?  At one point Anet posted that 500 is about 20-25% of "current worlds".  That was in 2018 or so.  If worlds are really around 2500 players then, being able to stack up to 500 vs. being able to stack up to 2500 (and beyond since PvE players can hop in at any time if they happen to be on a Full world) seems like there a rather large disallowance that WR is introducing.  I suppose that's one of the metrics Anet is going to look into with the data generated from these betas.

A few ways to look at it. 

Skill stacking:

In my observations, there's probably less than 500 players on NA, who's presence in a squad makes a real significant difference in fight performance.  Atm most "good" guilds have like 5-10 of these players.  Lesser guilds have 3 or less, and average guilds generally have 0.

Put even 50 of those players in 1 guild, and for the timespan that guild plays, they're going to be all but unbeatable.  The probably won't PPT hard, but they'll make 3-5 hours of NA pointless.  And they'll get bored, and probably go do something else.  But like, if you make some sort of way for guild performance to matter, then this WILL happen.

Play-time of off-hours stacking:

I could name some guilds, but we know who they are.... They basically always win their timezone(especially on weekdays), except for the rare occasions when multiple other guilds are arrayed against them.  A guild that could combine something close to 125 each of late NA+ OCX+SEA+EU, who play 4-8 hours per day, would probably be the optimal guild to win PPT on NA.  It's kinda hilarious that the last thing you want, to win PPT on NA, is NA players .....

Pure playtime stacking: 

Put together a guild full of players who play 8-16 hours a day, and just the pure pressure of backcapping is going to make them almost unbeatable.  

Pugmander stacking:

I think there's less than 25 commanders on NA who do a good enough job to beat average comped+vc guilds when typemanding Put 5-10 of them in a guild, and it's over, they win, especially if they have some TZ spread.  Heck this method would probably even work if guild sizes were dropped down to 25.

 

 

[Dawdler.8521]

7 hours ago, Arya Whitefire.8423 said:

Heck this method would probably even work if guild sizes were dropped down to 25.

WR solved then.

But you be the one to tell the people. I’ll stand right behind you to back you up. In full body armor. Right behind this 10 inch DU armored wall. Sitting inside an Abrams.

[Arya Whitefire.8423]

16 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

WR solved then.

But you be the one to tell the people. I’ll stand right behind you to back you up. In full body armor. Right behind this 10 inch DU armored wall. Sitting inside an Abrams.

WvW is just eternally doomed.  I accepted this years ago. Though I am pretty convinced that WR will doom it even faster.  Guess we'll find out!

[RisingDawn.5796]

5 hours ago, Arya Whitefire.8423 said:

WvW is just eternally doomed.  I accepted this years ago. Though I am pretty convinced that WR will doom it even faster.  Guess we'll find out!

Pretty much.

Alliances or WR, should of happened 5-6 years ago, after they announced it, now it feels like lower population and the lack of player base, also after several betas, there's all the same issues and bugs happening.

Some people i know joined their own alliances and it's been meh all round from what I've heard, since reset.

Maybe, it's time for them to focus on other WvW Content, but like what?

Edited January 19 by RisingDawn.5796

[joneirikb.7506]

On 1/17/2024 at 5:00 PM, XenesisII.1540 said:

Like I said, people need to feel the pain in order to learn their lessons, because apparently most don't remember what it was like before links, they don't understand why we need a WR system in the first place, or why we needed links in the meantime, and then there's the casuals who don't care about anything but logging on to get their tickets.

Well, here's a suggestion for ANet, besides "no downstate week", add a "solo server week", toss it in 2 times a year, and let players experience it again...

kitten that would be so miserable at this point...

[Mabi black.1824]

On 1/17/2024 at 9:57 AM, joneirikb.7506 said:

Now when it comes to some minor class-balance, or the usual small changes to the game mode, some egoistical thinking won't cause a big problem. But for things that affect the player-base motivation, it can very quickly escalate and cause a lot of players leaving/abandoning the mode. And this goes both ways, some will read this and thing "Yes, exactly! That's why they should do my idea!" which would just do the exact same thing but the other way, as it would impact a lot of players with a different motivation

I like this description of yours. It describes very well where we are right now. My thought, precisely because I'm passionate about this game mode is that I don't want to lose players through an update. If anything, I would like to see the exact opposite. This justifies all my critical remarks towards restructuring. It is good on the one hand and bad on the other.

A solution like this didn't have to be ordered by your doctor, you don't have to. So I suggest you reconsider your choices and start considering an upgrade for WVW with an inclusive vision, even better one of growth.The one-way update is the problem. . Leaving behind a few or many in reference to the different ''motivations'' is the problem. or probable problem. 

Edited January 19 by Mabi black.1824

[joneirikb.7506]

On 1/18/2024 at 12:15 AM, Arya Whitefire.8423 said:

A few ways to look at it. 

Skill stacking:

In my observations, there's probably less than 500 players on NA, who's presence in a squad makes a real significant difference in fight performance.  Atm most "good" guilds have like 5-10 of these players.  Lesser guilds have 3 or less, and average guilds generally have 0.

Put even 50 of those players in 1 guild, and for the timespan that guild plays, they're going to be all but unbeatable.  The probably won't PPT hard, but they'll make 3-5 hours of NA pointless.  And they'll get bored, and probably go do something else.  But like, if you make some sort of way for guild performance to matter, then this WILL happen.

Play-time of off-hours stacking:

I could name some guilds, but we know who they are.... They basically always win their timezone(especially on weekdays), except for the rare occasions when multiple other guilds are arrayed against them.  A guild that could combine something close to 125 each of late NA+ OCX+SEA+EU, who play 4-8 hours per day, would probably be the optimal guild to win PPT on NA.  It's kinda hilarious that the last thing you want, to win PPT on NA, is NA players .....

Pure playtime stacking: 

Put together a guild full of players who play 8-16 hours a day, and just the pure pressure of backcapping is going to make them almost unbeatable.  

Pugmander stacking:

I think there's less than 25 commanders on NA who do a good enough job to beat average comped+vc guilds when typemanding Put 5-10 of them in a guild, and it's over, they win, especially if they have some TZ spread.  Heck this method would probably even work if guild sizes were dropped down to 25.

 

 

Regarding guild stacking (of various kinds):

As long as you allow players to organise, that will happen to some extent. If you limited guilds to 5 members, they'd still do it. But at the same time if you remove the ability for players to organise you also remove most of the motivation for most players that isn't just chasing rewards.

So for example, they could run a test using WR and disable the guild-grouping, and just let every player be placed randomly. I think almost every veteran player would completely hate that (I know I would, if I can't play with guildies, I'd rather not play the game. I got other games I'd rather play then.)

So where to draw the line? How much is too much? Even if ANet limited guilds to max 5 for grouping with WR, players would find ways to abuse that. (For example, make tonns of alt accounts, group them up in various 5 man guilds, and then go through and find which ones got grouped with the most other 5 man groups they want to play with, and organise that way). And at that point, aren't you just rewarding the try-hards for try-harding, without giving other players effective means of fighting back?

To quote a friend of mine "The problem with MMOs/Games, is the players."

...

Now, to look at it from another perspective:

Will there be a few try-hard guilds, stacked with 500 active players/coverage/commanders? Yes there will, no doubt. But if the tier system works as it should, and get enough time to work, they should get paired up against each others in tier1 (hopefully, eventually, that's what the tier system is there for after all).

The majority of guilds on the other hand isn't really going to be like that. So how much do we sacrifice the game mode for the majority for the sake of neutering a few hardcore try-hards? As long as they have systems (that work...) to put those hardcore guilds against each others, so after 2-3 weeks they get put in tier 1 against each others, then that's fine.

Not perfect, but at least not a systematic failure.

I guess it's more about setting realistic expectations rather than trying to make a perfect system.

[Mabi black.1824]

If what you've done before has been able to embrace a wide range of different 'motivations', it means you've done a good job. Why should you do the opposite now?

Edited January 19 by Mabi black.1824