World Restructuring Status Update

[Chaba.5410]

4 hours ago, Odrson.1463 said:

The problem lies in the actual distribution of play hours after the matching:

While it is true that the matches are determined by the actual play time on all used accounts and thus are true and "fair", BUT it is not indicative of how the playtime will be split over the accounts after a new matching.
Skewing the results of the matchmaking and possible worsening the effect for other players that are matched with these accounts.

I do not say that you are actually abusing this system in any way, but it would be possible to do so.

 

tl;dr:

Player that are using multiple accounts will inevitably skew team creating when their playtime on those accounts varies depending on the resulting new matches, by not being (some what) predictable.

All of which is why teams get reshuffled.  Alt accounts functionally are no different from any other account that plays.  The algorithm's placement is not indicative of future playtime after new matching for ANY account.  ANY account will "skew" results.  All these players who say they have stopped playing or they suddenly started playing more because of more action or they need their GoB and they only have one account are skewing matches right now.  Reshuffling will adjust that.  WR is not meant to make perfectly predicted matches.  It's meant to mitigate such fluctuations.

Edited July 7 by Chaba.5410

[Chaba.5410]

4 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

You only need 2 accounts. On the first my guild of 500 men selects the primary alliance, if the same 500 men select the secondary alliance. When you're done, you don't need anything else. WR works on Friday nights, my guild logs in, checks where the two alliances have gone, a couple of hours of play to figure out which team is winning or where the best guilds we know of are.  A few minutes of discussion in the CIAT di Gilda and it's done. We decide to play the secondary alliance for the next 4 weeks. If by chance we were playing with our Primadia alliance the month before, we are doing the damage 2 times. Why do we empty a server of 500 active players (who disappear) while overloading another server of 500 players (who used to be ghosts)

Until your two alliances get placed onto the same team.  Good luck!

[Cyninja.2954]

1 hour ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Alt accounts functionally are no different from any other account that plays.

That is not completely true. Only if you ignore the player behavior behind the account. An alt account not only leads to a reduction of play hours on another account, it also leads to an increase of play time on the alt account. Most notably to CIRCUMVENT specific issues. That is simply not the case with regular accounts.

A regular account might decide to play more, or play less, fine. The algorithm might stack many players which suddenly decide to play less. Kitten happens and that match-up might be kittned.

If those players now move to another shard though, they skew the algorithm there too and thus a cycle begins.

Again I agree it is not a major issue, but it remains an issue none the less.

Quote

The algorithm's placement is not indicative of future playtime after new matching for ANY account. 

It is not, but this becomes more severe when the player placed behind that account remains a factor because he skewes the algorithm with more than 1 account and usually with intent.

1 hour ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Until your two alliances get placed onto the same team.  Good luck!

So we are relying now on this to happen for your argument to remain true? He has a valid point. The fact that it might not always apply (in fact it does not apply in a very rare few cases) does not in any way negate the point made.

Edited July 7 by Cyninja.2954

[Odrson.1463]

1 hour ago, Chaba.5410 said:

All of which is why teams get reshuffled.  Alt accounts functionally are no different from any other account that plays.  The algorithm's placement is not indicative of future playtime after new matching for ANY account.  ANY account will "skew" results.  All these players who say they have stopped playing or they suddenly started playing more because of more action or they need their GoB and they only have one account are skewing matches right now.  Reshuffling will adjust that.  WR is not meant to make perfectly predicted matches.  It's meant to mitigate such fluctuations.

You're right that single account user too can be hard to predict, and you are right too that the prediction isn't meant and never can be 100% accurate.

It still stands true, that users with multiple accounts will be harder to predict than users with one account.
UNLESS you split your play time across all accounts EQUALLY EVERY time.

 

Edited July 7 by Odrson.1463

[joneirikb.7506]

Regarding multiple accounts:

I think those people that use multiple accounts are more likely to be more active WvW players, and as such we can assume the majority of them to be Veterans (in one way or another). Their motivations for Alt'ing is in general going to be activity.

Where those that typically gets called Casual or Fair-Weather isn't as heavily interested in the mode, and thus instead just logs off WvW, either to PVE or to another game or Netflix etc.

The difference here is that one group is completely fine going elsewhere for entertainment, while the other group seeks out different entertainment in another server/team.

Personally, I see these fairly similar. While we traditionally see "Fair-Weather" as someone that wants to win get loot etc, it can just as well be seeking action. Seen plenty of people over the years that logs off if there isn't any zerg fights anywhere for example.

This is why I called it "Advanced Fair-Weather" earlier, because if a player has multiple accounts, and doesn't find the content they're looking for on their primary Team, they'll log off that account, and into another account. If you look at each account separately, then each account will just look like a fair-weather account.

Since there is no way to control fair-weather in the first place, I don't think it's worth the time and resources to put much effort into dealing with players running multiple accounts. Unless they actually manages to organize it on a big scale, and figure out how to game the system. After all, all Teams are made with the assumption that they have large parts of fair-weathers on them, that's not something that can really be designed out.

[Driger.5084]

8 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Since you said "Moo" I will assume NA T1:

Score: 60 vs 55 vs 53
KDR: 0.99 vs 0.82 vs 1.11
K+D: 18765 vs 16683 vs 16945

Moogoloo is currently second place. Where is it blatant?

I'm going to say something that will probably throw someone like you that can't read entire posts and only cares about numbers through a loop. K/D/R doesn't magically mean we're having fun. "Winning" a match where winning doesn't have any real benefit doesn't magically mean we're having fun. T1 isn't fun with the way it currently is.

My guild has the most fun when we have even number fights, or as close to it as possible. We're not getting that in T1. It's a slog up here where the most we get to do is kill off the enemy zerg's tail. Yes that helps your almighty "K/D/R" but it's incredibly boring and unfun. In T3 and below we constantly had even number fights. We had other small guilds to go up against and we got to do what we enjoyed most. Even in T2 we had that, just a bit rarer and we would usually try and find those other small guilds because they seemed to enjoy the fights against something other than a boonblob just as much. Even losing those fights was fine because we were having fun. In T1 that's not a thing. Either it's solo roamers flipping camps or boonblobs, and the only boonblobs are the ones running in the "alliance" guilds. 

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, Driger.5084 said:

I'm going to say something that will probably throw someone like you that can't read entire posts and only cares about numbers through a loop. K/D/R doesn't magically mean we're having fun. "Winning" a match where winning doesn't have any real benefit doesn't magically mean we're having fun. T1 isn't fun with the way it currently is.

My guild has the most fun when we have even number fights, or as close to it as possible. We're not getting that in T1. It's a slog up here where the most we get to do is kill off the enemy zerg's tail. Yes that helps your almighty "K/D/R" but it's incredibly boring and unfun. In T3 and below we constantly had even number fights. We had other small guilds to go up against and we got to do what we enjoyed most. Even in T2 we had that, just a bit rarer and we would usually try and find those other small guilds because they seemed to enjoy the fights against something other than a boonblob just as much. Even losing those fights was fine because we were having fun. In T1 that's not a thing. Either it's solo roamers flipping camps or boonblobs, and the only boonblobs are the ones running in the "alliance" guilds. 

Nothing of that has to do with the claim of being “blatantly” stacked.

You could have just said you’re not having fun 🤷‍♂️

[TheGrimm.5624]

1 hour ago, Driger.5084 said:

I'm going to say something that will probably throw someone like you that can't read entire posts and only cares about numbers through a loop. K/D/R doesn't magically mean we're having fun. "Winning" a match where winning doesn't have any real benefit doesn't magically mean we're having fun. T1 isn't fun with the way it currently is.

My guild has the most fun when we have even number fights, or as close to it as possible. We're not getting that in T1. It's a slog up here where the most we get to do is kill off the enemy zerg's tail. Yes that helps your almighty "K/D/R" but it's incredibly boring and unfun. In T3 and below we constantly had even number fights. We had other small guilds to go up against and we got to do what we enjoyed most. Even in T2 we had that, just a bit rarer and we would usually try and find those other small guilds because they seemed to enjoy the fights against something other than a boonblob just as much. Even losing those fights was fine because we were having fun. In T1 that's not a thing. Either it's solo roamers flipping camps or boonblobs, and the only boonblobs are the ones running in the "alliance" guilds. 

To give perspective, checking on this matchup right now you own more than 50% of all objectives. So yes there are swings in T1 NA. The question is the why of swings, that could be a number of different aspects honestly. Tags online, players that are running raids, players that will pug, havocs, roamers, flashmobs, players that only play when 'their' people are playing, hidden tags, tags asking other people to leave map, sweaty versus none-sweaty groups and it goes on. 

[Chaba.5410]

3 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

Unless they actually manages to organize it on a big scale, and figure out how to game the system.

Here's the "at minimum" blueprint to manipulate the system:

You have to replicate the old system's server transfers while overcoming the effect of reshuffling.

- You need one set of accounts as your "active" which you will be playing, one set as your "inactive" which you will use upon next team formation, and one set on "activity cooldown" where you stop playing it for 30+ days so it returns to an inactive state.
- Each set should contain an account for every team in a region.  Assuming 4 tiers, that would be 12 accounts per set or 36 total alts.  If there ends up being one more tier that you didn't expect, you'll need to get more accounts.
- Since we're talking big scale organization, which is necessary to have a game-breaking impact, a guild/alliance would need all their players to bundle these alts into (number of teams multiplied by 3) "battleguilds".  One set of battleguilds for "active", one set for "inactive", etc.  The account sets have to be matched properly to battleguild because of the reshuffling.
- At the start of a team formation, everyone in the guild has to coordinate their "inactive" set to pick which team each of the inactive battleguilds are going to play on.  This ensures placement across every team for it can't be predicted ahead of time how teams will perform.
- This inactive set becomes the "active" set then.  At the end of the team season, the "active" set should be put on cooldown and the next inactive set becomes the active one.

Since the max in an alliance is 500 players, imagine now getting 500 players to all purchase 36 accounts, level and gear them, AND get them matched all into the correct battleguilds and rotated properly. (Then take a guess on how many players got placed on the wrong team recently in smaller alliances because they didn't follow directions.)  While it is possible to do this, the amount of time and money involved makes it not all that probable.  Maybe you'll get a guild of 20 really dedicated manipulators doing it, but realistically what kind of game-breaking impact will 20 players have?

Edited July 7 by Chaba.5410

[joneirikb.7506]

6 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Here's the "at minimum" blueprint to manipulate the system:

You have to replicate the old system's server transfers while overcoming the effect of reshuffling.

- You need one set of accounts as your "active" which you will be playing, one set as your "inactive" which you will use upon next team formation, and one set on "activity cooldown" where you stop playing it for 30+ days so it returns to an inactive state.
- Each set should contain an account for every team in a region.  Assuming 4 tiers, that would be 12 accounts per set or 36 total alts.  If there ends up being one more tier that you didn't expect, you'll need to get 3 more accounts.
- Since we're talking big scale organization, which is necessary to have a big impact, a guild/alliance would need all their players to bundle these alts into (number of teams multiplied by 3) "battleguilds".  One set of battleguilds for "active", one set for "inactive", etc.  They have to be matched because of the reshuffling.
- At the start of a team formation, everyone in the guild has to coordinate their "inactive" set to pick which team each of the inactive battleguilds are going to play on.  This ensures placement across every team for it can't be predicted ahead of time how teams will perform.
- This inactive set becomes the "active" set then.  At the end of the team season, the "active" set should be put on cooldown and the next inactive set becomes the active one.

Since the max in an alliance is 500 players, imagine now getting 500 players to all purchase 36 accounts, level and gear them, AND get them matched all into the correct battleguilds and rotated properly. (Then take a guess on how many players got placed on the wrong team recently in smaller alliances because they didn't follow directions.)  While it is possible to do this, the amount of time and money involved makes it not all that probable.  Maybe you'll get a guild of 20 really dedicated manipulators doing it, but realistically what kind of game-breaking impact will 20 players have?

I did originally write up another rant about just this, and was wondering if I should add it to my previous post, but decided against it (trying to learn to write shorter posts and all that).

But largely I agree, it's theoretically possible, practically I'd almost applaud anyone that pulled it off because that won't be easy. That said I don't think they need quite *that* many "copy guilds" and alt accounts. If we for example assume that the acitivity time out is 16 weeks (4 months, at 1 month each wr-shuffle). They'd only need 4 guilds at minimum, and thus 4 alts per player. Assuming none of their guilds got matched together. If they add another guild/alt to that they can probably get around that as well. It would also put most of their communication out to external software like Discord/FB etc, to keep communication clear and not cause problems with people on wrong accounts and guild chats etc. They wouldn't have full control over where they happened to get, but they would (theoretically) be able to trick the system, into stacking 500 active players on a Team that wasn't supposed to have them.

And yeah:
* 10-20 people, not really a problem
* 100 people, going to feel it, but won't warp the entire match
* 500 people, yeah this is bad and ANet would have to intervene.

[Chaba.5410]

3 minutes ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

They wouldn't have full control over where they happened to get

You get full control over where you get placed by having a set of inactive accounts at every team formation event that can pick any team to be on because the system has no data.  The only reason to have an alt for every team is because you can't predict ahead of time how each team will perform or have content, etc.

Edited July 7 by Chaba.5410

[Chaba.5410]

I should add, the reason for the number of battleguilds is because accounts with no data are supposedly still placed on teams if that guild has data and do not get to pick any team.  That's the iffy part because it hasn't been made clear too well how placement works for accounts with no data vs. accounts with no data that picked a guild that has some data.  There were some past bugs with people getting placed on wrong teams related to this.

Edited July 7 by Chaba.5410

[ArchonWing.9480]

12 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

Again, the predominant behavior IS for alt accounts to play on the winning side, or at least avoid the smaller side. You are looking at individual player behavior, I am talking about general player behavior for which we even have terminology in place and the effect is well know. Please just stop. I get it, you really want the W here but what you are writing is making 0 sense and you know it.

If we had so many players eager to play on the losing side this WR event would not have happened to begin with and servers would not have gotten to the state they were in towards the end (though the flexibility to later shard amount might have become necessary either way) .

Well, even if that intent is not explicitly stated, I think it works that way in practice.

Even if someone makes an alt just to play with friends elsewhere which is fine and good, they would probably do so when there's no action on their main account and thus get bored. So maybe they're not switching accounts because the main account isn't "winning" but in general more activity will correlate to the strength of a shard.

And of course if the alt account's on a dead server, they may not play it at all or in the past, move it off.

So even if people are not doing it with the intention of playing on the winning side, these actions all will follow the same road and ultimately become indistinguishable from the rest regardless of initial motivation.

Edited July 7 by ArchonWing.9480

[manu.7539]

1 hour ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

* 100 people, going to feel it, but won't warp the entire match

Players managing multi accounts generally got to be more active than casual players, also better since they played more. So 100 very active and very good players cheating the relink system together, u'll probably fell it really bad! Thats how feels NA T3 this week, really bad 😞

 

[Mabi black.1824]

On 7/4/2024 at 1:25 PM, RisingDawn.5796 said:

Sure it could balance over time and it's early days, but we're locked in for 4 weeks (6 this time) every Team Matching, now we have to rely on second and maybe third accounts, if your matchup is dead, as it's difficult to have balanced matchups for weeks after, a new Matching?

The other option is to Alt+F4.

To this player/friend I wrote in this post that the best alternative is to play the game that Anet has given you, adjust your weekly goals accordingly because you can still have fun, even if things go wrong. And when I mentioned the issue of alternative accounts, it wasn't my intention to explain and especially promote this. On the contrary, I think it is stupid to do so.

It's not even happening, and let's hope it never happens. If we find it, we will find a way to fix it. Certainly reducing the limit to 250 players rather than 500 helps in this aspect as well.

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

On 7/6/2024 at 3:19 PM, Chaba.5410 said:

Dev created this thread to tell us what the issues are that need to get fixed.  Even if you see alt accounts as a minor issue (I don't), it isn't an issue that needs solving, especially in a system that adjusts for playtime fluctuations.

Those are the issues that they have the ability TO fix. Alt accounts are just another version of fairweathering, they get used by players when its convenient, and when there is no convenience, they don't get used. Anet likely can't get a fix on what accounts are alts over mains, and so EVERYTHING gets sorted with that algorithm as if they are main accounts. Do you understand why this is a bit of a balancing problem yet? You say it adjusts for playtime fluctuations, but that very adjusting is worked around by then using a different account more next matchup. This really is no different than servers tanking their last 2-3 weeks during linking so they would get a stronger link over a weaker one. We have all seen this before but now it's at the individual player level and not server or guild one.

[Every day pon.5386]

closed WvW Restructuring is(still, obviously,) needed to mitigate queue. & queue bug (cycling) is still present.

[adammantium.8031]

On 7/4/2024 at 8:51 AM, Cecil.4536 said:

...

The team-creation algorithm is performing as expected, and most teams are showing reasonably similar performance in terms of player hours, average war scores, and victory points. But things aren't perfect; there are a couple of teams that stand out as unbalanced, and even on well-balanced matchups we have noticed some performance gaps at specific times of day. We'll be adjusting the algorithm to better address this for the next team creation at the end of July.

We have also observed an issue related to time zone population balance that is specifically affecting large guilds. Our algorithm is trying to build a representative profile of guilds for the purposes of team creation. The larger your guild becomes, the more relevant the "averages" are in your data, and the less specific the profile becomes. This creates a situation in which off-hours groups that are part of large prime-time guilds are having their data nullified by the larger group.

...

 

It's a little reassuring to see this. Being on Mirror of Lyssa, I take it as given that we're one of the teams that are unbalanced. Combining that with the non-sensical placement in tier 6, this has ruined WvW for me, my guildmates, and frankly our opponents.

If you lack confidence in the algorithm for the next relink, I'd urge you to consider shortening matchups for the first week. Daily matchups to get everyone in a realistic tier could be an option.

And please consider removing tier 6 next relink, or at least explain your rationale for adding it. The old tier 5 was already very quiet. Anecdotally, there's not the playerbase to sustain it, and it adds a very content-light matchup possibility.

[lilfuzzy.8326]

Is it their intention to make wvw suck royally? do they even play the mode. so far looks like the laziest attempt to not actually fix anything. might as well just unplug the wvw servers if the lazy devs think spawn camping is a "fun" mode, and seriously how hard is it to fix line of sight to prevent the glitchy attacks/exploits or do you enjoy  screwing over your customers base? Due to your inability to actually do your job. so far looks like you condone cheaters using exploits as theyre doinng it constantly and reporting doesnt do squat. maybe fire the halfwit wvw devs and hire people with actual brains or do you enjoy harassing your customer base?

[XenesisII.1540]

Only boon blobs are allowed to "feel good" about wvw.

[RisingDawn.5796]

11 hours ago, adammantium.8031 said:

It's a little reassuring to see this. Being on Mirror of Lyssa, I take it as given that we're one of the teams that are unbalanced. Combining that with the non-sensical placement in tier 6, this has ruined WvW for me, my guildmates, and frankly our opponents.

If you lack confidence in the algorithm for the next relink, I'd urge you to consider shortening matchups for the first week. Daily matchups to get everyone in a realistic tier could be an option.

And please consider removing tier 6 next relink, or at least explain your rationale for adding it. The old tier 5 was already very quiet. Anecdotally, there's not the playerbase to sustain it, and it adds a very content-light matchup possibility.

It's rather interesting, that MoL has the highest kills in the EU, even compared to T1, which has two stacked worlds..

Overall, even though it's early days, I'm not impressed. The queue bug is still occurring, so their fix to reduce queues, by adding another Tier. will just make it feel too empty and spread out, while some Alliances are so stacked, that they will often have nothing to fight, with the numbers they can gather..

Edited July 9 by RisingDawn.5796

[Cyninja.2954]

1 hour ago, RisingDawn.5796 said:

It's rather interesting, that MoL has the highest kills in the EU, even compared to T1, which has two stacked worlds..

Overall, even though it's early days, I'm not impressed. The queue bug is still occurring, so their fix to reduce queues, by adding another Tier. will just make it feel too empty and spread out, while some Alliances are so stacked, they will often have nothing to fight, with the numbers they can gather.

MoL unfortunately was one of the most stacked shards created, stacked in a sense of large community guilds and thus a lot of guaranteed active players. Having them in tier 6 just magnified the issue. Both in terms of ruining the fun for any of the shards they met, as well as themselves stomping over every opponent due to numbers.

The choice to increase tiers to 6 (on EU) was obviously bad in hindsight. It would have been better to have more queues instead of unbalanced shards to this extent.

All this shows is that there needs to be qualifiers besides play hours which need to go into these calculations.Some of which would need to be:

- aggregated overall ppt activity of guilds placed on a shard

- aggregated amount of fighting of guilds versus ppt activity

- decisions of placing similar guilds with similar above activity closer to each other (and make sure not to create stacked shards with just 1 type of player on them and most definitely not with multiple large fighting guilds)

After which other qualifiers like coverage and maybe language could be added.

Finally, the current "get more players" meta with heavy kitten boon removal and celestial gear and perma boons does the rest in regard to make player count the most deciding factor. Player count was always the deciding factor for overall performance of a server, but a few years ago 15-25 player guild group could contest public blobs (full zone publics basically with 55+ players) by sheer better boon uptime (strip the opponents, avoid getting stripped and up-keeping boons yourself). That doesn't work any more in this heavily kitten boon removal and perma boon meta.

Edited July 9 by Cyninja.2954

[Batsu.3489]

This is just awful MoL already reached 400k point other two team total number doesnt even equal to MoL. Greenside everyone stopped playing most of my friendlist go to pvp or pve. Nice match up ANET.

[XenesisII.1540]

On 7/3/2024 at 10:09 PM, XenesisII.1540 said:

NA TI - 30 vp gap

NA T2 - 30 vp gap

NA T3 - 68 vp gap

NA T4 - 26 vp gap

NA T5 - 36 vp gap

------------------------------------

EU T1 - 15 vp gap

EU T2 - 40 vp gap

EU T3 - 12 vp gap

EU T4 - 103 vp gap

EU T5 - 59 vp gap

EU T6 - 67 vp gap

One week later..

NA TI - 19 vp gap

NA T2 - 68 vp gap

NA T3 - 34 vp gap

NA T4 - 30 vp gap

NA T5 - 25 vp gap

------------------------------------

EU T1 - 25 vp gap

EU T2 - 45 vp gap

EU T3 - 83 vp gap

EU T4 - 23 vp gap

EU T5 - 42 vp gap

EU T6 - 21 vp gap

[Arya Whitefire.8423]

A VP is roughly equal to 1 hour of advantage.  The closest in the above is 12 hours, if that's on Friday, that's not close enough.

Not that anyone who can actually swing the VP scores, cares about VP scores, other than to tank for an easier matchup next week ....