Petition to revert the PPK change

[Zyreva.1078]

10 minutes ago, H K.4057 said:

The thing is, those guilds/players don't go to guild halls or eotm arenas. They insist on camping out on a BL or sometimes even EBG, the same way duelers hang out by middle sentry instead of going back behind the windmill. If those guilds and players insist on affecting the experience of other players in the matchup, then their contributions should be reflected in the score. This leads to better matchups in the future where servers that like to fight get matched up with other servers that like to fight.

Like i already said multiple times (in other topics, not sure if here too) - for matchmaking purposes the changes (to both ppk and timezone weighting) might make sense, tho we have yet to figure out whether it actually works out well or not. For anything else - fairness, competiveness, rewards, whatever else - it would just punish smaller numbers.

Edited July 30 by Zyreva.1078

[Sonderm.4639]

On 7/25/2024 at 12:41 PM, Sheff.4851 said:

Do you believe that the forums may also be a bit of a group think echo chamber? Or do they reflect a neutral, unbiased discussion about World vs. World that doesn't occur in other communities?

Comparing the forums and the Discord server(s) in question is a bit off though. The forums are free for all to participate in (barring overzealous moderation), the relevant discord is for the select few - the selection criterion being enjoying a certain kind of gameplay. If a groupthink emerges in the Discord it is by design. If a groupthink should emerge here it is because why would anyone shout into the void on the forums when they can have direct conversations with the devs in the Discord.

[Experimentee.7612]

At the moment, there's not a great reason for many to care enough about score. I know there are discussions going on about changing that with the introduction of, for example, gizmos and such.

If we are in a world where a lot more people start caring about score, then there has to be the right balance between PPK and PPT. I don't know what the right balance looks like. So I can't decide whether 3 points per kill is a good change or not. But it certainly shifts WvW in the direction of PPK.

Both PPT and PPK rewards players with WXP and participation for skirmish pips and reward track progress. In addition, PPTers also get a bit of loot for killing lords and guards and karma for events, but it hardly compares to the lootbags rewarded to PPKers.

I think that is a design problem, because lootbags become the primary reason many players PPK - not for the points. 

How many people would still PPK if they only earned points and not lootbags?

I'm not here to discourage PPK. It's a legitimate and important playstyle in WvW. I just think it should not be rewarded disproportionately to the point where lootbags become the primary focus for many and score (whether for structures/objectives or kills) becomes secondary to them.

Edited July 31 by Experimentee.7612

[H K.4057]

22 hours ago, Zyreva.1078 said:

Like i already said multiple times (in other topics, not sure if here too) - for matchmaking purposes the changes (to both ppk and timezone weighting) might make sense, tho we have yet to figure out whether it actually works out well or not. For anything else - fairness, competiveness, rewards, whatever else - it would just punish smaller numbers.

I think it's worth noting that winning, losing, and tiers don't really matter at all. These changes to PPK and timezone weighting should give us better matchups, like you said, which should lead to better in-game experiences for the average player. This will change if and when ANET actually tries to make winning matter.

[Sheff.4851]

22 hours ago, Sonderm.4639 said:

Comparing the forums and the Discord server(s) in question is a bit off though. The forums are free for all to participate in (barring overzealous moderation), the relevant discord is for the select few - the selection criterion being enjoying a certain kind of gameplay. If a groupthink emerges in the Discord it is by design. If a groupthink should emerge here it is because why would anyone shout into the void on the forums when they can have direct conversations with the devs in the Discord.

The forums are free for all to participate in, that's true. But all players do not participate in them. Look at some of the recent polls -- they have 50, 60, 70 votes. That's not a representative sample of the playerbase, it's just a very small portion of vocal players. A single boonball group that wanted to brigade a poll could wipe all of those votes out, and that wouldn't make it any more or less representative.

Meanwhile, a number of WvW-focused Discords are not based on gameplay selection criteria at all. They have preferences -- GuildJen's WvW section of Discord skews towards roamers and solo players, the NA and EU Alliances Discords skew towards organized play, the GW2 Subreddit Discord is a total melting pot, but most conversation involves roaming, dueling, and small-scale play. But that's the neat part about communities. You can expose yourself to multiple different perspectives, to mitigate the groupthink and echo chamber that any one Discord server may have.

If you choose to expose yourself to different ideas and ways of playing the gamemode, anyway.

[TheGrimm.5624]

3 hours ago, H K.4057 said:

I think it's worth noting that winning, losing, and tiers don't really matter at all. These changes to PPK and timezone weighting should give us better matchups, like you said, which should lead to better in-game experiences for the average player. This will change if and when ANET actually tries to make winning matter.

Actually that's why it is a healthy point to discuss it since they said that is what is after these scoring changes and they are refining them now. 

[Sonderm.4639]

2 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

The forums are free for all to participate in, that's true. But all players do not participate in them. Look at some of the recent polls -- they have 50, 60, 70 votes. That's not a representative sample of the playerbase, it's just a very small portion of vocal players. A single boonball group that wanted to brigade a poll could wipe all of those votes out, and that wouldn't make it any more or less representative.

Meanwhile, a number of WvW-focused Discords are not based on gameplay selection criteria at all. They have preferences -- GuildJen's WvW section of Discord skews towards roamers and solo players, the NA and EU Alliances Discords skew towards organized play, the GW2 Subreddit Discord is a total melting pot, but most conversation involves roaming, dueling, and small-scale play. But that's the neat part about communities. You can expose yourself to multiple different perspectives, to mitigate the groupthink and echo chamber that any one Discord server may have.

If you choose to expose yourself to different ideas and ways of playing the gamemode, anyway.

I (and I suspect the poster you replied to originally) wasn't referring to some rando discord server but to a discord server I believe exists (correct me if I am wrong) where Anet wvw devs and certain members of the wvw community participate - just like the infamous balance discord that leaked messages a few years back.

[H K.4057]

40 minutes ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

Actually that's why it is a healthy point to discuss it since they said that is what is after these scoring changes and they are refining them now. 

World Restructuring was announced in 2018, and it took them over 6 years after announcement to get to this permanent "beta" stage. Any other changes that they've announced will more than likely also be on an excruciatingly long timeline. I guess it's ok to talk about now, but I don't think it should influence the way scoring and matchups work.

[XenesisII.1540]

On 7/31/2024 at 12:34 PM, Sheff.4851 said:

The forums are free for all to participate in, that's true. But all players do not participate in them. Look at some of the recent polls -- they have 50, 60, 70 votes. That's not a representative sample of the playerbase, it's just a very small portion of vocal players. A single boonball group that wanted to brigade a poll could wipe all of those votes out, and that wouldn't make it any more or less representative.

Meanwhile, a number of WvW-focused Discords are not based on gameplay selection criteria at all. They have preferences -- GuildJen's WvW section of Discord skews towards roamers and solo players, the NA and EU Alliances Discords skew towards organized play, the GW2 Subreddit Discord is a total melting pot, but most conversation involves roaming, dueling, and small-scale play. But that's the neat part about communities. You can expose yourself to multiple different perspectives, to mitigate the groupthink and echo chamber that any one Discord server may have.

If you choose to expose yourself to different ideas and ways of playing the gamemode, anyway.

What do you expect, the developers barely ever post in here, even in the early days they preferred to post over on reddit, even the community managers don't post unless it's to pass some information they managed to remember to post because pvp is not their interest. You can't expect to have a full group of people still discussing wvw after 12 years, when they've ignored wvw and it's forums for most of it's existence. Last time we had any meaningful discussion with anet was back in 2016-17 when Tyler and McKenna were implementing changes and running polls to find out what we wanted.

Then we had that blowup a couple years ago about the secret discord group used for discussing balancing, I'm sure there wasn't 50-70 people in there either, yet they were responsible for balance going on for the entire game. Same goes for wvw, none of these wvw ideas came out of thin air, most of them recently are wtf who asked for that, they discussed it with someone before proceeding and it certainly wasn't the forums. 

You know what would be really swell from anet, if they bothered to mention what the changes are going to be before deploying them. Like I dunno maybe the repair wall was going from 10% to 50% and let the players have a discussion about it before doing it? Hey maybe 25% would have been a better starting point to test this out, what are the other pros and cons. But no they just do it and don't even have a discussion, you just have to accept it, and then say they've received positive feedback.... from whom? not these forums that's for sure! and I highly doubt any defenders were happy about it either.

In any case all these multiple forums are useless, it's blatantly obvious they don't listen to any type of player in wvw these days other than who they are catering to, the guilds, the group they spend all their time with. Trying to turn wvw and combat into an oppressive raid mode in open zones is the wrong direction, trying to push wvw which is suppose to also be a siege mode into some kinda deathmatch mode is the wrong direction, trying to cater to guild communities at the cost of destroying server communities is the wrong direction. Let's be real the bandwagoners ruined servers(mostly guilds), and then they got rewarded by having everyone else suffer by moving around them every month instead.

But go ahead and continue to blindly defend them, some of us are tired of the bias and excuses and don't expect much anyways.

Edited August 1 by XenesisII.1540