Embracing World vs World Restructuring

[Rain.6375]

The recent WvW restructuring initiative has introduced a wave of changes aimed at revitalizing this beloved game mode. As a guildless player, I couldn't be more excited about the positive impact these changes are having on the community and the opportunities they provide for meeting new people.

One of the most significant benefits of the WvW restructuring is the way it breaks down barriers that previously existed between players. In the past, guild affiliations often dictated the social dynamics within WvW, sometimes creating an insular environment where guildless players felt isolated. The new matchmaking system, however, focuses on dynamically balancing teams based on skill and activity levels rather than guild memberships. This means that players from various backgrounds and playstyles are now grouped together, fostering a more inclusive and cooperative atmosphere.

For guildless players like myself, the restructuring will be a breath of fresh air. It provides a unique opportunity to forge new connections and make friends with like-minded players.

In conclusion, the WvW restructuring is a remarkable step forward for Guild Wars 2. For guildless players, it opens up a world of opportunities to meet new people, learn from one another, and feel genuinely included in the game's epic battles. It's an exciting time to dive into WvW, where the bonds you form on the battlefield can lead to lasting friendships

[Morvran.8265]

I'm betting one the opposite.

As a guildless player you'll be gatekept and flamed for taking up space, not allowed to join zergs. And as a roamer you'll constantly be reshuffled, never really establishing any connections to your team.

You seem to be under the impression that dissolving servers and putting more emphasis on guilds will somehow make guild membership matter less and people will socialize more outside their guilds, which is.. an interesting takeaway.

[Rain.6375]

Morvan i can gladly say i would never ever in my life join a blob,zerg or what it's called, spec and class stacking, that aint my jam at all, roaming with a small grp have been fun, seeing the zergs go on just looking to kill is something i will never get, so i am happy this happend!

but as you say i might be wrong, lets say im old ive been a pvper for a long time, wow ranked pretty decent back in the day, elder scrolls and so on. You might be right but what ppl say i dont care much, i just hope, it cant be worse then the way it is on my server now.

[rwknoll.7824]

23 hours ago, Morvran.8265 said:

I'm betting one the opposite.

As a guildless player you'll be gatekept and flamed for taking up space, not allowed to join zergs. And as a roamer you'll constantly be reshuffled, never really establishing any connections to your team.

You seem to be under the impression that dissolving servers and putting more emphasis on guilds will somehow make guild membership matter less and people will socialize more outside their guilds, which is.. an interesting takeaway.

This feels like an alarmist and cynical view to me. I agree that guilds will matter, but they should matter! I’m looking forward to being able to play with my guild and not worrying what server we are on. I think it will be easier to organize play, whether that’s zerg focused or smaller squads to take out towers or camps while the bigger group focuses on keeps. Remember this is still going to be a beta stage; if it ruins WvW based on the metrics ANet is monitoring, they’ll change the process or the algorithm, and I trust they will explain their rationale transparently. 

[TheGrimm.5624]

I am glad you are looking forward to it.

On 6/7/2024 at 5:16 AM, Rain.6375 said:

The recent WvW restructuring initiative has introduced a wave of changes aimed at revitalizing this beloved game mode. As a guildless player, I couldn't be more excited about the positive impact these changes are having on the community and the opportunities they provide for meeting new people.

As we have seen there are a vast amount of ways that players define communities, so I am reading this as seeing new people.

On 6/7/2024 at 5:16 AM, Rain.6375 said:

One of the most significant benefits of the WvW restructuring is the way it breaks down barriers that previously existed between players. In the past, guild affiliations often dictated the social dynamics within WvW, sometimes creating an insular environment where guildless players felt isolated.

Not sure how this will change except you will now see different faces and have no background with them so it may create even more divides.

On 6/7/2024 at 5:16 AM, Rain.6375 said:

The new matchmaking system, however, focuses on dynamically balancing teams based on skill

No, it actually doesn't have anything like that. It's based on play hours, players and might have some logic of time of play. 

On 6/7/2024 at 5:16 AM, Rain.6375 said:

and activity levels rather than guild memberships.

Activity levels yes, but guild memberships will matter more. The previous logic was to sort out Alliances based on activity and size to spread them out. Then do the same thing for Guilds. Lastly the unguilded would be used to fill in the cracks and try and even out numbers across the servers. Without Alliances the first sort is Guilds. The fill in for Alliances are Comm (Community Guilds) Guilds. They are your best bet if you don't want to join a Guild or are looking for like minded players so that you can find familar faces as these "server" get deleted and reformed each 4 weeks.  

On 6/7/2024 at 5:16 AM, Rain.6375 said:

This means that players from various backgrounds and playstyles are now grouped together, fostering a more inclusive and cooperative atmosphere.

Again this is your Comm Guilds you might want to be on the lookout for.

On 6/7/2024 at 5:16 AM, Rain.6375 said:

For guildless players like myself, the restructuring will be a breath of fresh air. It provides a unique opportunity to forge new connections and make friends with like-minded players.

Good hunting there and I hope that works and you do find that.

On 6/7/2024 at 5:16 AM, Rain.6375 said:

In conclusion, the WvW restructuring is a remarkable step forward for Guild Wars 2. For guildless players, it opens up a world of opportunities to meet new people, learn from one another, and feel genuinely included in the game's epic battles. It's an exciting time to dive into WvW, where the bonds you form on the battlefield can lead to lasting friendships

We will all be living in interesting times, for those that decide to float. I think we will see a return to some posts from 2012, but let's see what we see.

Edited June 10 by TheGrimm.5624

[Astralporing.1957]

Notice, that the system of balancing will be set against more active guildless players. The whole server population will be balanced against the core guilds/alliances, which means that the servers with strong big guilds will get balanced with less active small guilds/guildless players. So, the more active you will be as a guildless player/small guild member, the less likely you'd be to end up on a good team. This makes it so you'd be forced to join a big guild, or suffer.

It may be irrelevant (or even slightly beneficial) for casual WvWers that come only to farm for their GoBs (or something), and it will definitely be good for highly organized WvW-focused guilds, but for the middle segment of players, it's going to hurt very heavily.

What the consequences of this will be is hard to predict without knowing the exact breakdown of player types in WvW, of course, but i'm not so sure it will be a positive change overall.

[Atoclone.4810]

On 6/8/2024 at 3:46 PM, Morvran.8265 said:

I'm betting one the opposite.

As a guildless player you'll be gatekept and flamed for taking up space, not allowed to join zergs. And as a roamer you'll constantly be reshuffled, never really establishing any connections to your team.

You seem to be under the impression that dissolving servers and putting more emphasis on guilds will somehow make guild membership matter less and people will socialize more outside their guilds, which is.. an interesting takeaway.

So far what I've noticed on frost citadel does not reflect that at all. Please note that I've not interacted as I'm happy playing with just my small guild. 

I've seen discords advertised.

Open none discord commanders. 

Guild offering training sessions on certain roles.

 

All of which I see as very positive to a solo/new player

[Custodio.6134]

On 6/8/2024 at 4:46 PM, Morvran.8265 said:

I'm betting one the opposite.

As a guildless player you'll be gatekept and flamed for taking up space, not allowed to join zergs. And as a roamer you'll constantly be reshuffled, never really establishing any connections to your team.

on my team (Temple of Febe), it´s the entire opposite. 

- the probably biggest "alliance" on our team even consists of not only guilds, but also a lot of players that are not affiliated with any guild (other than the big alliance-guild, which technically doesn´t count as it is not structured like a "typical" WvW-raiding-guild)
- we have NEVER had a tag that gatekept guildless players based on the fact that they are guildless (including auto-sorted players from outside of the alliance-guild)
- Everyone on the team is allowed to join zergs. In most cases, joining the discord (Note: these publics happen on the, open for everyone, EU Alliance discord -voice) is the only requirement. Nobody cares about who you are, or where you come from. If you´re in one of the main guilds of the alliance, a "pug" from the alliance, or a completely randomly assigned player. Everyone is welcomed, as long as they bring what the commander asks for (aka, viable zerg-classes, and in most cases being in public voice) 

I have NEVER seen a player being gatekept in a public or "semi-closed" public just because of their guild (or them not being in a guild) since WR started. It´s entirely irrelevant on our side. 


So, the only reason for someone not being able to establish a connection to other players, is that they don´t reach out to those communities (including those "alliances", that from my experience are always open for guildless players). In other words: those unaffiliated players are effectively gatekeeping themselves, simply by not taking even basic action/interaction with other players. You can´t blame this on anyone but those players themselves. 

Edited Monday at 02:11 PM by Custodio.6134

[Dean Calaway.9718]

On 6/7/2024 at 10:16 AM, Rain.6375 said:

This means that players from various backgrounds and playstyles are now grouped together, fostering a more inclusive and cooperative atmosphere.

Did you use the whole can of cake eater corporate talk here?

On 6/8/2024 at 3:46 PM, Morvran.8265 said:

As a guildless player you'll be gatekept and flamed for taking up space, not allowed to join zergs. And as a roamer you'll constantly be reshuffled, never really establishing any connections to your team.

^ This.

The whole server system was basically a sports team, you'd fight for your team, you could zerg for your team, you could roam for your team, you could run Dolyaks or snipe Dolyaks. But you were doing it for your team.

People spent years doing this and now they basically reshuffle everything and gave all the new patch work teams a new name...

There's no history there, and there's no loyalty, and if that wasn't bad enough after all these years and after all the work that went into the project you're still getting 50 vs 10 maps...

[Chaba.5410]

2 hours ago, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

The whole server system was basically a sports team

It's still a sports team.  Have you never played a team sport in any recreational league where the participants are shuffled every season to form the teams for the season and the league keeps track of your personal stats so they know where to place you?  It's quite common.

Edited Monday at 04:36 PM by Chaba.5410

[Dean Calaway.9718]

3 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

It's still a sports team.

Not my team, not my guys, not my pig, not my farm, not my people, not my problem.

[Chaba.5410]

Just now, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

Not my team, not my guys, not my pig, not my farm, not my people, not my problem.

So you've never played in such a recreational league, I take it.  It's fun.  Everyone gets to know each other as the teams reshuffle.  And you all go have a beer together after the matches and shoot the sh*t.

[Dean Calaway.9718]

1 minute ago, Chaba.5410 said:

So you've never played in such a recreational league, I take it.

If you ever been in the military and deployed, imagine someone telling you are now gonna go over there and be buddies with the people you spent the last 10 years putting in the ground. Plus they'll just be changing your country name and flag...

I mean these days you don't even have to imagine that, aren't we lucky!

[Chaba.5410]

Just now, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

If you ever been in the military and deployed, imagine someone telling you are now gonna go over there and be buddies with the people you spent the last 10 years putting in the ground. Plus they'll just be changing your country name and flag...

I mean these days you don't even have to imagine that, aren't we lucky!

Why did you just change your analogy of WvW from sports teams to the military?  This isn't a war.  It's a game.

[Dean Calaway.9718]

Just now, Chaba.5410 said:

This isn't a war.

Don't I know it.

[TheGrimm.5624]

On 6/16/2024 at 5:50 AM, Astralporing.1957 said:

Notice, that the system of balancing will be set against more active guildless players. The whole server population will be balanced against the core guilds/alliances, which means that the servers with strong big guilds will get balanced with less active small guilds/guildless players. So, the more active you will be as a guildless player/small guild member, the less likely you'd be to end up on a good team. This makes it so you'd be forced to join a big guild, or suffer.

Not sure what you were basing this on. Maybe I miss read the documentation over years but its more of a round robin down based on size and attributes from there. So smaller groups or individuals will be sorted against the same when it gets around to their sort. Unless you are indicating that the larger sorts were so far off that it left large gaps after the first sorts and more gap fillers were needed due to that. But 'strong' big guilds should be paired again other big guilds, strong or not. And then down from there. 

[Astralporing.1957]

36 minutes ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

Not sure what you were basing this on. Maybe I miss read the documentation over years but its more of a round robin down based on size and attributes from there. So smaller groups or individuals will be sorted against the same when it gets around to their sort. Unless you are indicating that the larger sorts were so far off that it left large gaps after the first sorts and more gap fillers were needed due to that. But 'strong' big guilds should be paired again other big guilds, strong or not. And then down from there. 

The plan was to spread the big guilds around, and then do finetuning using smaller groups/solo players. Think of it like balance scales, with big guilds being big weights, and smaller groups/single players being small pebbles. You put the bigger weights on scales, then use pebbles to balance what remained. And that means the smaller pebbles (the less active players) will go towards the scale with bigger weight, while the bigger pebbles (more active players) will land up on the scale that was underweight.

When you try to balance two sides, you don't group big with big and small with small. Nor do you balance each size "tier" separately. Latter can end with significant unbalances. Former will 100% end up being unbalanced.

[TheGrimm.5624]

43 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

The plan was to spread the big guilds around, and then do finetuning using smaller groups/solo players. Think of it like balance scales, with big guilds being big weights, and smaller groups/single players being small pebbles. You put the bigger weights on scales, then use pebbles to balance what remained. And that means the smaller pebbles (the less active players) will go towards the scale with bigger weight, while the bigger pebbles (more active players) will land up on the scale that was underweight.

When you try to balance two sides, you don't group big with big and small with small. Nor do you balance each size "tier" separately. Latter can end with significant unbalances. Former will 100% end up being unbalanced.

I think we are saying the same thing in general. It was more the statement that more active guildless players would be sent to less active groups.

Based on before it was a multi-level sortation in a round robin environment sorting from largest to smallest. Agree the smallest is the mortar in the equation. What's unclear on is what sort of mix of the attribute they are using. Take just the easy two from the beginning, number of players and their play hours. Now could they use 1 player that plays for 8 hours to cover 4 players that only play 2 hours each, I don't think they used that method directly since even using averages there is still scaling to be considered and if those 4 went from 2 just 4 then they are that much more out of balance.  They had talked about a mix of players and hours and then adding in more from there. That's before if they factor in other attributes that were mentioned and what else the numbers have shown them.

You could be right though. I admit one of the reasons my guild is going with the float method is I am curious to see how the sorts look. But we all know what happened to that cat.

 

[Astralporing.1957]

29 minutes ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

They had talked about a mix of players and hours and then adding in more from there.

They originally talked about wanting to utilize more factors, like hours played (how long you play), but also coverage (when you play), consistency (do you play off and on, or have more steady WvW playtimes) or your veterancy levels, That was years ago however, and this seem to have been too complicated for them. Late mentions are about activity only (meant as hours played), nothing more.

[Chaba.5410]

2 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Think of it like balance scales, with big guilds being big weights, and smaller groups/single players being small pebbles. You put the bigger weights on scales, then use pebbles to balance what remained.

I think you misunderstood what is being weighed.  The original population algorithm weights by the number of hours played and then averages it out over some amount of time, such as a month.  This is because coverage has a large impact on the score.  Anet has stated in the past that they sanity check this method with WXP gain rates and found it to be relatively in-line.

It's this population algorithm that became the basis for how players are weighted for WR. (See the answer for "Player score, value, evaluation?" https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/19675-world-restructuring-faq/)

This makes a lot of sense because a guild of 500 players selecting the same battleguild yet barely plays WvW should not be weighted heavily just because of their player numbers!  Maybe 20 of them ever play regularly.  The others joined just so they can hop on every once in awhile to play with their guildmates if they need GoB or something.  Imagine how outnumbered they'd constantly be if placed on teams by the size of their guild.

Anet adds in some other factors now on top of number of hours played.  We don't know exactly what goes into this evaluation because they haven't explicitly said.  They've only written about some of the things they may consider, such as if a player commands and what their squad sizes are usually.  That also makes a lot of sense because a guild of 50 players doing boonball meta can have a big impact on individual skirmishes.  We wouldn't want them all to get placed on the same team just because they may play only on the weekend during primetime and have little impact on coverage.  No matter the size or number of hours played, more organized groups typically win out over less organized groups.  They need to be spread out across teams.

Again, refer to the answer in the FAQ.  Over the past betas for WR and going forward, Anet is "iterating" on this player evaluation.  This is why it's an "always-on beta".  Clearly the fact that two "fights guilds" got placed on some same teams when they should have probably been on different teams, like what happened in EU, shows what the latest algorithm didn't consider.  There's no expectation though that it won't get fixed.

Edited Monday at 10:17 PM by Chaba.5410

[Astralporing.1957]

@Chaba.5410Ah yes, i should have been more specific. By big guilds i meant big WvW guilds (guilds with big WvW presence). The big 500-man guilds of which only one player plays WvW will (or at least should) obviously be treated similarily as solo players, because effectively that's what they are. When i speak about size, you can treat it as me talking not about the size of the guild as a whole, but rather the "size" of that guild's WvW activity.

And as for article you linked, they admitted at some point later that a lot of stuff, like, for example, playing off hours (the very important part of counting coverage) is not actually counted, even if it was originally mentioned to be a factor they considered.

[Chaba.5410]

3 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

And as for article you linked, they admitted at some point later that a lot of stuff, like, for example, playing off hours (the very important part of counting coverage) is not actually counted, even if it was originally mentioned to be a factor they considered.

Yep.  I don't think they are considering which skirmishes players usually play in yet.  There's been no word either on if they will add it in or if they determined not to.  All that can be surmised so far is that they are still "iterating" on it, like was mentioned in that three week beta earlier this year.

[Morvran.8265]

16 hours ago, Chaba.5410 said:

It's still a sports team.  Have you never played a team sport in any recreational league where the participants are shuffled every season to form the teams for the season and the league keeps track of your personal stats so they know where to place you?  It's quite common.

There are sports teams that are more than a hundred years old.

There's a reason these don't get erased and reshuffled every few weeks. A brand is important for building a community.

[Chaba.5410]

6 hours ago, Morvran.8265 said:

There are sports teams that are more than a hundred years old.

There's a reason these don't get erased and reshuffled every few weeks. A brand is important for building a community.

So? WvW isn't a pro league only reserved for the highly skilled players with try outs and talent scouts for brand protection. It's recreational level play where anyone off the street can hop in and play at any time and no one can stop them. Dude runs out onto the pitch and suddenly he's part of the "brand". Yea, that would really go over well in pro leagues.

Edited Tuesday at 02:53 PM by Chaba.5410

[Mabi black.1824]

19 hours ago, Chaba.5410 said:

So? WvW isn't a pro league only reserved for the highly skilled players with try outs and talent scouts for brand protection. It's recreational level play where anyone off the street can hop in and play at any time and no one can stop them. Dude runs out onto the pitch and suddenly he's part of the "brand". Yea, that would really go over well in pro leagues.

you shouldn't look at it that way. Of course we're just talking about a game here. it should not be compared on its merits with a professional sport. anet created teams of 2000 players specifically because if someone plays every other week or doesn't show up for 1 month it makes no difference. having a brand or a flag or a server where all the players (without exception) can identify and feel an active part, even in a game, why not, is an excellent way to involve people. If you can't see it I don't know what else to say.