So let's talk Scoring

[ArchonWing.9480]

1 hour ago, coro.3176 said:

It's really frustrating being able to potentially win a 1v4 in open field against some players attacking your tower, but not actually be able to do it because of down state. I've had a lot of situations where I'll get 2 downs, but not be able to finish either because of the pressure from the other 2 players, plus the downed attacks. Sometimes I might get one, but usually they res their downs and kill me. It does feel bad to get nothing out of that, and they actually score some points (for stomping me).

I'd prefer no downstate, I think, but points for downs would be interesting.

Or some idiot runs in just to rally them. 

I remember on my old server that there were some that I would let die to avoid this; maybe use the time they're stomping them as a dps opportunity.

Most hand ressing isn't too bad and poison helps but sometimes you get some degenerates with mercy runes or something  that mass res practically instantly so it just becomes dumb.

This is coming from someone that went around alone on a transfuse necro solely to save randoms from being ganked and I think the above is so dumb lol.

Edited July 6 by ArchonWing.9480

[Riba.3271]

PPK is fine, it was already buffed and contributes half the score during active hours.

Score for capturing objectives is fine because it has 3 effects: Buffing your own tick, reducing enemy tick (permanently) and giving you points through both capturing/kills. Now you could double or triple the initial score, but how much impact will it have? Realistically you can only reset like 3-4 keeps in 2 hours, so youd get like 200 extra points. If it has any impact on outcome, then enemy is also capturing things and most of that 200 points is nullified.

I am actually school of thought that upgrading of keeps and castles should be slowed down and in return they should be stronger. In particular castles should require 200% more dolyaks, and keeps 50%. Currently upgrading is fast enough where keeps/castles can get from T0 to T3 in less than hour, but they're also extremely weak. With 5 golems booned up and couple shield gens, attackers are guaranteed to get into lord room. It never made sense why they made all 3 kind of objectives (Towers, Castles, Keeps) require same amount of dolyaks when the original design wasn't so.

[Mabi black.1824]

18 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

I don’t think basing an entire matchup system on how successful you are is a good idea.

I expressed myself badly, probably; In my hypothesis, the pairings are made in reference to the success of the previous month, but always in terms of balance, for example you will put together 1 server that has won the last 3 months with 2 servers that lost the last match etc etc, always trying to provide balanced matches.

[Mabi black.1824]

17 hours ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

I'm not convinced that this will fix things sufficiently. A month is a long time and you forget that even though you might be paired with better servers the next month, that doesn't mean that the direct opponents are weaker, so you might still end up losing. And that's 2 months in a row then. 

I think that there will be some servers that will dominate just the same, just not as much in this configuration. I think you overestimate people's patience and skill. There's just not enough going around to fill up many servers.

We say that we can control competition and involvement through the final goal, which is what you win. We take all precautions to avoid toxicity. For example. If you build 45 teams competing with each other, we can imagine splitting their final award into 5 tiers. The top 5 teams get a Pot 1 prize, the second 10 teams a Pot 2 prize, the third 10 teams a Pot 3 prize, etc etc
Everyone wins something, and for everyone it's something you only get exclusively by participating in WVW. You can't find them anywhere else in the game. So when you go to PVE with a new armor skin and they tell you ''hey where you got that'' you're going to answer exclusively in WVW. 

If there are enough players for 45 teams of around 800 players, only Anet can tell us. If there aren't any, we make fewer or smaller ones. But the most important thing here, would be to realize that WR is only a tool to be used 1 time a year or in emergencies to reset WVW. Hold on to your guild because 1 time a year WVW, comparison, competition, participation, teams, leaderboard reset. They will be launched and everything starts again.

It therefore becomes another regular appointment during the year. we have Friday evenings ; We have the end of the month when we reshuffle the teams, we will have the end of the year when all the guilds and players are reshuffled. If it were up to me, I would add 2 more appointments during the calendar year. A kind of mini summer tournament and a mini winter tournament. Official WVW events. not third-party stuff. Then we are talking about motivating/engaging the player who participates. Then I can still see a future for this game mode.

Edited July 7 by Mabi black.1824

[Mabi black.1824]

14 hours ago, coro.3176 said:

I've had a lot of situations where I'll get 2 downs, but not be able to finish either because of the pressure from the other 2 players

You haven't been able to finish them the way you're built. You've built a loud explosion but you're a little bit of glass, or you've exhausted your invulnerable/reflect etc etc. This is not wrong. This is a clear symptom of balance in construction.

[joneirikb.7506]

23 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

I don't think points help much in deciding to defend a T3 or a T0. You're gonna defend a T3 because of it's upgrades, particularly if it's a keep with a waypoint. They also scale rewards according to the objectives level, that's an incentive they added last year to defending(too bad they then went and made a mess of defending so everything turns into a paper train zone in prime time).  

I honestly couldn't tell you how much points an objective is worth for capture or for it's ppt whether it's at t0 or t3, and I would imagine 90% of the players couldn't either without looking up the wiki for it.

I think that overall ANet would get better results from researching player motivation, and try to build in systems that would help motivating players even in losing situations rather than bothering with Scoring changes tbh.

So something like making each upgraded objective something more unique, have own abilities/mechanics that players can interact with while defending. And honestly making objectives an advantage/force multiplier so people actually want to defend, and feel like there's something they can do even if outnumbered. Or to put it more bluntly, I don't think 20 vs 20 in a defended objective should be a fair fight.

Which is completely against ANet's current idea of making the K-Train never stopping. As well as completely against most of the "fight" players that wants "fair fights between same numbers" etc. But I think it's the only realistic way to create "back and forth" gameplay loops, and not just feed into the current fair-weather approach of just leave if losing since there's nothing to be done.

That would probably create more active gameplay for more people than any changes to scoring, or probably to much anything else.

[XenesisII.1540]

7 minutes ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

I think that overall ANet would get better results from researching player motivation, and try to build in systems that would help motivating players even in losing situations rather than bothering with Scoring changes tbh.

So something like making each upgraded objective something more unique, have own abilities/mechanics that players can interact with while defending. And honestly making objectives an advantage/force multiplier so people actually want to defend, and feel like there's something they can do even if outnumbered. Or to put it more bluntly, I don't think 20 vs 20 in a defended objective should be a fair fight.

Which is completely against ANet's current idea of making the K-Train never stopping. As well as completely against most of the "fight" players that wants "fair fights between same numbers" etc. But I think it's the only realistic way to create "back and forth" gameplay loops, and not just feed into the current fair-weather approach of just leave if losing since there's nothing to be done.

That would probably create more active gameplay for more people than any changes to scoring, or probably to much anything else.

I agree, which is why I suggest things such as an overwhelming buff that could help the two losing sides gang up on the biggest side type of thing. The outnumbered buff should be a temporary motivator, but all it does is gives you bonus magic find and what ever, things that still require kills... when you're outnumbered...

There should always be a motivating reason to defend, people have different reason to defend something, defend what's yours period, for the rewards, for the advantage, for the points, for the time/gold investment, for the fight. But most of all you have to make sure the players are still willing to stay on a map to defend and I think boon ball tend to destroy that more than people think.

At this point anet doesn't care anyways.

Edited July 7 by XenesisII.1540

[joneirikb.7506]

1 minute ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

I agree, which is why I suggest things such as an overwhelming buff that could help the two losing sides gang up on the biggest side type of thing. The outnumbered buff should be a temporary motivator, but all it does is gives you bonus magic find and what ever, things that still re

I don't really like changing the outnumbered effect for a few reasons. For one thing it's map wide, it's generally out of your control/agency, and I dislike how it can affect smaller skirmishes all around the map.

I'd have to think more about ways to motivate players to gang up on the leader, the only thing that comes to mind is rewards... That said, make the leading team drop "golden loot bags" and I'm pretty sure you'd see a change in gameplay.

Objectives have a few advantages that I personally like from a design perspective. They're supposed to be the focal points, and are also desire-able from zergs perspective for Activity, Rewards, and hopefully victims to crush. Since they're always present and static objects, if you know you can fall back to an object that it will help you against enemies, it will be better able to draw fights toward objectives. If you know you get a defensive advantage there that you can actually use to fight back then players will feel encouraged to bring a fight to an objective. It's also something you can choose to do, or not, I think that freedom is important. This should hopefully create a loop where players meet, draw toward an objective, some back and forth, defenders might be able to force the attackers back and they leave for something else, and then the defenders might decide to follow or not. Which should hopefully be a bit better than today.

 

[XenesisII.1540]

3 minutes ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

I'd have to think more about ways to motivate players to gang up on the leader, the only thing that comes to mind is rewards... That said, make the leading team drop "golden loot bags" and I'm pretty sure you'd see a change in gameplay.

Yeah I don't care much for the outnumbered buff in it's current state, the overwhelming buff would replace it anyways, it essentially puts a bounty on the largest side on the map so that they drop better loot or give more points if that's going to be important again, and you could even include the objectives so that the lords drop extra loot or something.

So instead of having two sides that potentially have outnumbered and then go after each other for whatever potential bonuses, it would shift to one side that has the buff or debuff I guess, and the two other sides would go after them if they want the bonuses.

If one side has 50, one has 25, and one with 15, you could potentially stop having the 50 and 25 double teaming the 15 side because it's "easier", now you've changed the motivation of the 25 to go after the 50 as well, whether it's their objectives or picking on their reinforcements, or outright double teaming them in fights.

That 2v1 motivation on the weakest has been a problem in the game for a long time.

[joneirikb.7506]

2 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Yeah I don't care much for the outnumbered buff in it's current state, the overwhelming buff would replace it anyways, it essentially puts a bounty on the largest side on the map so that they drop better loot or give more points if that's going to be important again, and you could even include the objectives so that the lords drop extra loot or something.

So instead of having two sides that potentially have outnumbered and then go after each other for whatever potential bonuses, it would shift to one side that has the buff or debuff I guess, and the two other sides would go after them if they want the bonuses.

If one side has 50, one has 25, and one with 15, you could potentially stop having the 50 and 25 double teaming the 15 side because it's "easier", now you've changed the motivation of the 25 to go after the 50 as well, whether it's their objectives or picking on their reinforcements, or outright double teaming them in fights.

That 2v1 motivation on the weakest has been a problem in the game for a long time.

Actually, just simply:
* No PPK or loot drops from enemies not in first place.
* PPK and loot drops from enemies in first place.
* Make it a big shiny icon/effect nor named "overwhelming" but "I DROP LOOT!"

😛

[TheGrimm.5624]

6 minutes ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

Actually, just simply:
* No PPK or loot drops from enemies not in first place.
* PPK and loot drops from enemies in first place.
* Make it a big shiny icon/effect nor named "overwhelming" but "I DROP LOOT!"

😛

lol. We should have a new achievement line for fighting out numbered and a new title track with it.

Edited July 7 by TheGrimm.5624
hit enter by accident to early

[XenesisII.1540]

1 minute ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

Actually, just simply:
* No PPK or loot drops from enemies not in first place.
* PPK and loot drops from enemies in first place.
* Make it a big shiny icon/effect nor named "overwhelming" but "I DROP LOOT!"

😛

I suppose you would need to take hard approach to it, since there's a lot of lazy players in wvw who can't take a hint, they'll need that big neon blinking icon on the enemy to figure it out. 🤭

But having loot one sided wouldn't be much of a motivator for the biggest side to play and give away their loot, so it would have to remain as bonus loot.

[joneirikb.7506]

1 minute ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

I suppose you would need to take hard approach to it, since there's a lot of lazy players in wvw who can't take a hint, they'll need that big neon blinking icon on the enemy to figure it out. 🤭

But having loot one sided wouldn't be much of a motivator for the biggest side to play and give away their loot, so it would have to remain as bonus loot.

True..... Hmm.... let's see if I can come up with a funny counter to that on the fly.... what if.... winning team gets bonus loot from DEFENDING!

[joneirikb.7506]

Thinking a bit more about motivation vs leading server (while out training). and came to the conclusion that it's quite limited what you really can do without causing more problems. Example, adding a "Leader" effect, that applies to the team that is leading at any given time.

Leader Effect:
* Gain extra PPK from killing against leader team
* Gain extra PPC (capture) from capturing against leader team
* Improve chances to drop heavy loot bags from leader team
* Gain +1 PIP from killing against leader team

And I think that's the most that really can be done with that type of mechanic.

I was thinking about adding 3 tiers, to discourage fighting the lowest ranking, and make leader go for second, but the more I thought about it, the more I honestly disliked the implications. For similar reasons I started disliking any other changes I could come up with to link to those "ranks".

The main problem is that while a team might be leading, that doesn't mean they're the dominant team at all times of the match. So adding more stuff to that, or more ranks, would just end up making the play time more miserable for the players of the leading team outside of their prime time. And the goal should be to give Team 2+3 a reason/motivation to attack Team 1, not to make Team 1's game experience feel worse than it has to.

So nothing else really made sense, unless we added a bunch of clauses, exceptions, and dependencies on Outnumbered effect and what not. And at that point it would probably be smarter to just solve things in different ways instead.

[Sviel.7493]

While scoring may need adjustments, it's an odd place to start.  Since this says QoL, it may just be some small tweaks that don't add up to much.

WvW is in need of a handful of major overhauls.  Those overhauls will necessarily change how players approach the mode which will influence how scoring plays out.  If you're planning to upgrade WvW, you can't start with scoring because it will be affected by later changes and need to be redone again.

The best scoring QoL I can imagine is just communicating to players how the scoring works.  A long time ago, Yaks used to give 3 points upon route completion.  Because of this, NC on RBL was the most valuable objective on the map when you owned your northern triangle (roughly 50 PPT total iirc).  However, Yak points weren't mentioned anywhere in game so basically no one knew about it.  Yak points never influenced player behavior because players didn't know about them.  I think they reduced it to 1 point on route completion but they may have just removed it as well.  Either way, reducing Yak points meant taking more control over the score out of the hands of non-zergs as slapping Yaks was far less valuable than before.

A good scoring system should influence players to create the necessary conflicts to drive the game mode.  That means players must have some idea of the effect their actions will have on the score even if they don't go out of their way to look it up.  It also means that players shouldn't be incentivized to avoid conflict, so PPK shouldn't be a major factor.  PPT and Yak points are the healthiest of the current score factors as they create inherent conflict between teams and you can't turtle up to deny the other side points.  You're going to be involved in the conflict one way or the other.

[Mabi black.1824]

7 hours ago, Sviel.7493 said:

The best scoring QoL I can imagine is just communicating to players how the scoring works.

Completely agree with this

[Johje Holan.4607]

I would love to see a scoring change that would encourage attacking the dominant server. But I’ve also been thinking about incentives to win like others have mentioned. I am beginning to think some mechanic like Darkness Falls in DAOC would be the best thing to have. Since it’s not really a scoring change I’ll make a separate thread about it. 

[CafPow.1542]

1 minute ago, Johje Holan.4607 said:

would love to see a scoring change that would encourage attacking the dominant server.

Well i mean it already does if you wanna win. Scorewise there is nothing you need to change.

only in terms of benefits / loot you could change something and i don’t think it should be changed.

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

 Change wvw reward track to give points in the track not every 5 minutes, but on earning wxp. A full track is 4000 points, match it 1:1 to each exp point earned, HOWEVER, begin to share exp with all others involved. This is your PERSONAL rewards, based off of what you are doing/accomplishing.

 

Then change the skirmish reward track(this one changes a good bit more) to be based only on ppt scores(take current ppt values and multiply by 10 or so, I do not have an exact number). Take your current team's ppt and again, share/split that up between everyone playing for your server in that timeframe. This is your TEAM based rewards.

End of match, 1st place players will receive a 30% bonus matching both personal and team based rewards. 2nd place will get 15%, 3rd will get nothing. Tiers receive a 5% increase bonus for each tier above last(3rd place gets these). The more players fought and progressed over the week, the more they receive from the bonuses at the end.

A lot of this is designed for groups of all sizes to have potential to flourish, as the strongest servers will still be in t1 and get a sizable 20-25% bonus on top of winning, but they will likely have to share MUCH MORE than the lower tier servers will. Same as playing when your server is weak and holding what you have can net you more than playing only when you are strong.  

Oh and we need more things people want purchasable! Wvw only skins, we need a big list of options, not stuff thrown at us in those lockboxes. Need more long term things to work towards!

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

A lot of numbers in my stuff could be adjusted, but would love to hear everyone's thoughts, we all love this stuff, right? 

[Sviel.7493]

@Dinas Dragonbane.2978
WXP gain varies drastically based on player actions.  That is a difficult thing to normalize and may cause much more harm than good if attempted.  If rewards are tied to WXP, then K-Trainers are going to get far more rewards than anyone else.  Scouts, defenders and the clean-up crews will get virtually nothing.

In addition, if we split rewards based on active players, we create an incentive for people to push others out of the game mode.

I like the idea of bonus rewards at the end of the week, but they should probably recognize contribution as well as rank.  We want to give third place a reason to keep fighting while also rewarding first and second.  As for the mechanics of that?  I don't know.

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

3 hours ago, Sviel.7493 said:

@Dinas Dragonbane.2978
  If rewards are tied to WXP, then K-Trainers are going to get far more rewards than anyone else.  Scouts, defenders and the clean-up crews will get virtually nothing.

In addition, if we split rewards based on active players, we create an incentive for people to push others out of the game mode.

 

Did you miss the part where the wxp gets split? If you are 1 person in a 50 man squad you get 1/50 of the wxp. No more of this zerg gets 100% credit for everything they do/kill. Killing one player that gives 100 wxp shouldn't mean everybody in a squad gets 100 wxp, its one of the reasons zergs exist, there is little to no downside.

As to your 2nd part, its supposed to encourage spreading players out over teams AND timezones. Ever see a guild or server completely dominant at a certain time of day whether primetime or off hours? Do they stomp the competition so bad it ceases to exist, or hardly did to begin with? The part about the team based rewards could encourage some to actually swap to these weaker teams and actually get more rewards than zerging it up, because the way the game works now the loser gets little to nothing and the winning zerg does whatever it wants.
Will there be people that will try to push others out of the game mode? Of course, that's no different than our present and our past of now almost 12 years. The difference is likely that will only be more in the higher tiers and not the lower ones, the endgame of this is the players playing the most efficiently at winning the mode with the fewest people can get the most out of it. If all 4 maps are queued up, you still need to make sure those 4 queues are as efficient as possible at holding territory(yes killing is one of the best ways to do so for those worried its not)

[Safty.7326]

My recollection may be wrong, but in the past did not having harder time to take objectives even by map q blobs alleviate the blobbing to where hitting multiple targets was required to catch other teams out. It made scouts, roamers and havoc teams all the more useful. These devs strayed imo endorsing blob play for easier player engagement.

It would be an amazing scoring system if it could break up blob meta.

But all I am seeing is traditionally 20ish to 30ish guilds are now full squad guilds as they call on alliance players to join their raid. It is what the alliances is designed for right? And there is probably excess in a 2nd squad following same tag.

[Dawdler.8521]

30 minutes ago, Safty.7326 said:

My recollection may be wrong, but in the past did not having harder time to take objectives even by map q blobs alleviate the blobbing to where hitting multiple targets was required to catch other teams out. It made scouts, roamers and havoc teams all the more useful. These devs strayed imo endorsing blob play for easier player engagement.

It would be an amazing scoring system if it could break up blob meta.

But all I am seeing is traditionally 20ish to 30ish guilds are now full squad guilds as they call on alliance players to join their raid. It is what the alliances is designed for right? And there is probably excess in a 2nd squad following same tag.

This seem all over the place...

At the end of the day, it's the same players now and then. Gathering players in a full squad is just your average zerg, it existed in the past too as did full zoneblobs on a daily basis. It's not what alliances are designed for - it's what WvW is designed for. Whether they rep the same guild or not is pretty irrelevant.

Scouts, roamers and havoc teams become far more important the lower the player counts are on the map because reaction times to finding threats become important rather than just having a meat shield population seeing enemies as run past. With everyone claiming WvW is dead and they're always outnumbered on every team against every other team, it should make them more useful than ever.

[Safty.7326]

32 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

This seem all over the place...

At the end of the day, it's the same players now and then. Gathering players in a full squad is just your average zerg, it existed in the past too as did full zoneblobs on a daily basis. It's not what alliances are designed for - it's what WvW is designed for. Whether they rep the same guild or not is pretty irrelevant.

Scouts, roamers and havoc teams become far more important the lower the player counts are on the map because reaction times to finding threats become important rather than just having a meat shield population seeing enemies as run past. With everyone claiming WvW is dead and they're always outnumbered on every team against every other team, it should make them more useful than ever.

If you leave ebg once in awhile you might find the fight guild community in the borderlands 

As for useful roamer/scouts/havoc don't you mean useless as the best they can do is back cap and pvd. Where a dozen or so players could make a keep a drawn-out fight, is now just a bag farm for the other team if you bother defending.

I like your optimism, but it is not what I am seeing in match ups.