The scoring changes are the wrong solution

[Experimentee.7612]

 

On 7/26/2024 at 10:51 PM, Sheff.4851 said:

The current system is more equitable for playtime, but when a group has felt special for a very long time, and then changes are made that reduce that group's effectiveness, it definitely feels unfair to them specifically, even when it's a more equitable system for all players.

It is not equitable at all. It just swings the favour from one group of players to another, in a rather rash manner. And introduces additional risks as pointed out in my original post.

On 7/26/2024 at 11:02 PM, Chaba.5410 said:

This is a problem regardless of off-hours vs NA/EU prime skirmish.  That's why historically there's been servers with "weak NA" that existed in higher tiers.  The score generated by off-peak times was causing teams to not be balanced during NA, for example.  So unbalanced teams during off-hours would also cause unbalanced match ups elsewhere.  How do you fix that?

You artificially balance the teams by scaling up the score generated by the team with fewer players by a factor that accounts for, precisely, the difference in the number of players on each team. That way you get balanced teams at all times of the day.

On 7/27/2024 at 4:38 PM, A Hamster.2580 said:

"control for the number of players" "same number of players during peak"

That's where your claim is wrong. You just assume number of off hour players = number of prime time players to conveniently make your claim correct.

On 7/27/2024 at 4:46 PM, A Hamster.2580 said:

You don't know that your contribution will be worth less unless you know the exact number of players that played during prime time time slots and exact number of players that played during off hour time slot to do the calculations. If your team happened to have unusually more prime time players than what this new system tried to account for, your contribution might actually be worth more as an individual when you play during off hour than when you play during prime time. (Ex: 70+ players playing during prime time time slots and queing all maps while only 5-10 players playing during off hour time slots)

I know it can be counterintuitive, but you gotta calculate by individual players per the new system, not by one single conglomerate.

That's not right at all. The principle you are arguing is that the score generated in a 5v5v5 is worth less than the score generated in a 70v70v70, which is absurd. I believe that the score generated in those two instances should be just as worthwhile as each other, because the teams were balanced, even if the total number of players were different.

Edited July 28 by Experimentee.7612

[A Hamster.2580]

11 minutes ago, Experimentee.7612 said:

That's not right at all. The principle you are arguing is that the score generated in a 5v5v5 is worth less than the score generated in a 70v70v70, which is absurd. I believe that the score generated in those two instances should be just as worthwhile as each other, because the teams were balanced, even if the total number of players were different.

I will just repost what I posted in another thread.

41 minutes ago, A Hamster.2580 said:

It is because the 2 hours slot that they play in is less populated than others so they receive proportional victory points for the entire team. They are not receiving the victory points for themselves but rather the entire team.

They already have the WvW reward track, skirmish reward track, wizard vault rewards, weekly achievements rewards, and events/kills bag drops for individual rewards. The victory points are a team reward that help to determine whether a team should move up or down a tier and should be rewarded proportionately based on number of players active in each skirmish.

[Experimentee.7612]

16 minutes ago, A Hamster.2580 said:

I will just repost what I posted in another thread.

If teams are balanced, why should score generated by a 70v70v70 in peak times be worth more than a 5v5v5 in off-peak times?

Awarding more points simply because there are more players online is absurd to me. This is a "competitive" game mode, not a popularity contest. 

[Sheff.4851]

5 hours ago, Experimentee.7612 said:

If teams are balanced, why should score generated by a 70v70v70 in peak times be worth more than a 5v5v5 in off-peak times?

Awarding more points simply because there are more players online is absurd to me. This is a "competitive" game mode, not a popularity contest. 

Because more people play in prime than off-hours. You can't have a 70v70v70 at 6am eastern. There's not enough players to support that. You award points proportionally to how many people play, otherwise, the best way to win a match involves having all of the players in NA prime log in at 5am in order to flip towers, which will burn out all your players and make them quit.

You award points to when people are active precisely because it's a competitive game mode, because if you treat all timezones equally you incentivize players to play at weird hours and avoid other groups for the sake of coverage and score.

[Chaba.5410]

9 hours ago, Experimentee.7612 said:

You artificially balance the teams by scaling up the score generated by the team with fewer players by a factor that accounts for, precisely, the difference in the number of players on each team. That way you get balanced teams at all times of the day.

And how do you prevent players from logging off or yelling at others/getting extremely toxic to log off so their score scales up?  Competitive players will always seek an advantage and having your score scale up by how many players you have is a big advantage just ripe for exploitation.  Almost reminds me of BG's old organized logouts to get the server opened up to get more transfers past the Full status.  Pair that with some defense buffs and maybe move the slider towards 3:1 defender's advantage and that'll make for a great combination that'll push a server with little population up the tiers to even more imbalanced matches.

Edited July 29 by Chaba.5410

[Mabi black.1824]

4 hours ago, Chaba.5410 said:

And how do you prevent players from logging off or yelling at others/getting extremely toxic to log off so their score scales up?

But how do players yell at others to leave a map? as if then if someone asked me while I have my 2 hours of play I would answer him with a thunderous laugh. We are talking about a differential dynamic coefficient (measure the difference in hours of play) on 4 maps. How can a player be aware that what will such a coefficient can assume? and suggest a behavior to other players? 

Let's be clear. Are we able to measure the hours of play accurately? Or are we doing it as transfers were controlled before? Open the gates and everyone in? Because if we can, it is certainly the best and unequivocal way to make WVW competitive for real. 

Or perhaps it should be Anet who speaks to us clearly. What we are saying here, has already been said. It's nothing complicated. But what we see is something else entirely. We are anonymizing the teams, we are breaking the score for real, as if we are moving permanently out of a competitive mode to enter a more ''random'' mode. perhaps it is better to say it clearly.

[Zok.4956]

8 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Because more people play in prime than off-hours. You can't have a 70v70v70 at 6am eastern.

But you can have a 7v7v7 at 6am eastern. And they both should score the same.

8 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

You award points proportionally to how many people play, otherwise, the best way to win a match involves having all of the players in NA prime log in at 5am in order to flip towers, which will burn out all your players and make them quit.

That's an exaggeration, of course, and you know that.

In a competitive game, it's the results that count, not how hard the individual teams tried.

A 70v70v70 should therefore count just as much as a 7v7v7, regardless of what time it takes place.

But what's important in a competitive game is the same number of players on both/all sides. Regardless of whether it's 1v1, 2v2 or 11v11.

Anet is therefore using the wrong metric for dynamic scoring. The correct metric would be to change the scoring if there were major imbalances in the current number of players.

But I have little hope that Anet will do it right, because that would take away the fun of boonblobs who want to overrun other players 50v5.

Instead, Anet is changing the game mode of WvW from a 24h/7days game mode to a "few hours prime time only" game mode. They apparently want to close WvW in the "off-hours" without closing WvW in the off-hours.

 

 

 

 

[Arya Whitefire.8423]

One intermediate solution, would be to track daily activity and throw out the 4-6 most imbalanced skirmishes each day. 

Another alternative would be to score the 4-6 best skirmishes for each world, each day.  Incentives on this one might be a little weird.  Though it would probably result in closer matchups, some of the time.

 

 

[Chaba.5410]

6 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

Let's be clear. Are we able to measure the hours of play accurately? Or are we doing it as transfers were controlled before? Open the gates and everyone in? Because if we can, it is certainly the best and unequivocal way to make WVW competitive for real. 

I wrote about competitive players looking for and exploiting any advantage they can.  Your response didn't address that at all.  How something is measured doesn't matter to such players.  Players don't need such details.  How do they tell?  Why, just look at the score.   Just log out and get more score.  EZ.  Let those T3 objectives tick as high as possible.  You don't need as many players to defend as to attack.

Edited July 29 by Chaba.5410

[TheGrimm.5624]

The reason 5/4/3 system works in that it doesn't discount effort in play. So lets say we all played prime time. We all had all maps queued. There would still be a server in positions of 1,2 and 3 outside of a tie. Using weighted periods server 1 might fell good about that but servers 2 & 3, it kind of felt like wasted time. In a 5/4/3 scenario you still get the sense that effort was well spent and there is time for catching up.  

5/4/3 and skirmishes were already added to handle night capping and we keep saying that is the issue but is it? Or is it like prime time? Is it a side has more or that a side has a focusing element? In an ideal sense all players should just know what to do. You don't need a tag if players know what needs to be done. Kill them, hold your stuff, take theirs, don't get dead if you can. But a lot of players like to follow a tag. So how much during prime are driving foci versus player count? How much outside of prime is the same? So if prime does have closer numbers and more overall, why punish servers landing in 2 & 3 for playing that time period? Was it they lost due to better play? Due to more focused play (tags)? Due to less invis tags? Due to better clouds? Better havocs? More zergs, less zergs? Better roamers? Creating such wide spreads in a given time zone I don't think played out while even outside of the bugs. If you really wanted weighted periods or more score for "prime" times (I still don't agree with giving weight personally) then you should still reward  servers 2 & 3 closer scores to account for more players in those periods. 

We also don't really talk about the opposite. If a side has a strong prime time, how much of that carries over after that point? How much of it is that a side loses their focusing elements? I mean to be fair, how many do you really need to take an objective? So it really comes down to how many are looking to do content, how many you have, and how many are good with driving content. That may not even be a tag, just players that are looking to get others into motion. Various old servers had their motivating elements. The WR is said to be accounting for tags, but it won't ever actually be able to account for some elements so weighting periods I am not sure is a good answer. That's even outside of saying one group needed better organization versus another or the level of effort dropped as the numbers did.

Glad they rolled it back to allow new sorts to get to their placements. Hope that they share what they think worked or didn't using weighted periods, would be an interesting live stream from Anet.

 2 cents.

 

[Experimentee.7612]

19 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Because more people play in prime than off-hours. You can't have a 70v70v70 at 6am eastern. There's not enough players to support that. You award points proportionally to how many people play, otherwise, the best way to win a match involves having all of the players in NA prime log in at 5am in order to flip towers, which will burn out all your players and make them quit.

You award points to when people are active precisely because it's a competitive game mode, because if you treat all timezones equally you incentivize players to play at weird hours and avoid other groups for the sake of coverage and score.

I believe that in a competitive game mode, teams earn points for skill/things they do, over and above the opposing teams. I don't see a justification for teams to earn more points simply because they are larger at a certain time.

If you want more people to play together at a certain time of day - that is a different problem that requires a different solution. I mentioned an idea in another thread:

"... I think we could go back to the server system, where each server has an identity/style/level of ambition and you simply join the server that best fits you.

To enable that, players could be allowed to transfer for free an unlimited number of times until they find the right fit for them. Clearly, it would be very chaotic for people to constantly hop servers all the time, so the transfers could be restricted to certain windows/deadlines, as with the current world restructuring.

And if the artificial balancing I mentioned before is implemented, different population levels on different servers would not be a concern either."

That way you find a server that is active at the times you desire.

As for being matched with compatible opponents, that is another problem still. I've had a desire for WvW to enter seasons each quarter for a period of two months or so - like the old season/league system. Matchmaking could ensure each server faces every other server at least once to then determine the overall winner.

Then there would be an off-season period for one month or so, where maximising points is not the primary objective any longer, and WvW becomes a sandbox for people to play however they want. In this off-season, artificial balancing/scaling is removed, people are free to transfer servers an unlimited number of times, and players can arrange themselves as they wish. For you and others that enjoy the same playstyle (i.e. big epic zerg fights during primetime with tonnes of lootbags), you would have the freedom to arrange yourselves for this.

This way, you satisfy the different groups of WvW players who are looking for different things out of the same game mode. It would also be convenient if the quarterly seasons coincided with the quarterly expansion updates, just to tie some interest among WvW players to the expansion release cycle, beyond new weapons and relics. 

17 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Meh, no point arguing over this stuff. They aren't going to listen to feedback here, did they listen to anything in regards to defense changes in the last year? did they listen to anything in regards to boon strips in the last 3 years? did they listen to anything in regards to roaming in the last 2 years? Players like Sheff will never see the other side, they play in their own bubble, they're never going to "get it", no reason to when the changes are made for them, plus they're an anet partner, whose side are they gonna be on 99% of the time? 🤷‍♂️

Anet is no longer looking after wvw as a whole, they're looking after certain players. They all got their way, anet wants you to quit playing wvw the old way, and play boon ball deathmatch. Either play it or move on. In the end, points don't matter(guess what no one is going to play weird hours just because you change the points around), so why waste anymore effort arguing over it, or boons, or WR for that matter. 🤷‍♂️

You are right. But it's nice to dream.

16 hours ago, Chaba.5410 said:

And how do you prevent players from logging off or yelling at others/getting extremely toxic to log off so their score scales up?  Competitive players will always seek an advantage and having your score scale up by how many players you have is a big advantage just ripe for exploitation.  Almost reminds me of BG's old organized logouts to get the server opened up to get more transfers past the Full status.  Pair that with some defense buffs and maybe move the slider towards 3:1 defender's advantage and that'll make for a great combination that'll push a server with little population up the tiers to even more imbalanced matches.

You are right. The scaling will have its weaknesses. It needs to be carefully designed to ensure it can not be exploited. If many people log out during a skirmish, it would have consider how best to manage that to avoid their team gaining an unfair advantage. 

8 hours ago, Arya Whitefire.8423 said:

One intermediate solution, would be to track daily activity and throw out the 4-6 most imbalanced skirmishes each day. 

Another alternative would be to score the 4-6 best skirmishes for each world, each day.  Incentives on this one might be a little weird.  Though it would probably result in closer matchups, some of the time.

 

 

The problem here is that it ultimately has the same problem as the recently implemented system - i.e that the contribution of players at certain times of the day is minimised or entirely ignored. That is not fair.

Edited July 29 by Experimentee.7612