Analyzing the New VP System (Prime Time vs Off Hours)

[A Hamster.2580]

The new EU VP Distribution has the following:

FIRST	6	6	6	15	15	15	15	15	30	42	30	15
SECOND	4	4	4	10	10	10	10	10	20	28	20	10
THIRD	2	2	2	5	5	5	5	5	10	14	10	5

 

We will assume here that prime time are the three time slots with first place gaining 30, 42, and 30 points.

Let's do three calculations and compare them to see how an off hours based team fares against a prime time based team.

Off hour team that get first place in all off hour time slots but gets third place in the three prime time slots:

6+6+6+15+15+15+15+15+10+14+10+15 = 142

Prime time based team that gets first place in all three prime time slots but gets third place in all off hours slots:

2+2+2+5+5+5+5+5+30+42+30+5 = 138

A third team that gets second place in all slots just for the sake of comparison:

4+4+4+10+10+10+10+10+20+28+20+10= 140

 

The new NA VP Distribution has the following: 

FIRST	33	33	21	9	9	9	13	13	13	13	13	21
SECOND	22	22	14	6	6	6	8	8	8	8	8	14
THIRD	11	11	7	3	3	3	4	4	4	4	4	7

 

 

We will assume here that NA prime time are the four time slots with first place gaining 21, 33, 33, 21 points

Off hour team that get first place in all off hour time slots but gets third place in the four prime time slots:

11+11+7+9+9+9+13+13+13+13+13+7 = 128

Prime time based team that gets first place in all four prime time slots but gets third place in all off hours slots:

33+33+21+3+3+3+4+4+4+4+4+21 = 137

A third team that gets second place in all slots just for the sake of comparison:

22+22+14+6+6+6+8+8+8+8+8+14 = 130

 

So what do you guys think? I think these are a lot closer than what many here have lead us to believe.

An EU prime time heavy team can still ultimately get third place if all they have is prime time players.

An NA prime time heavy team may barely get first place even when losing all off hours time slots, but they would have to win the 4 prime time slots, an equivalent of winning for 8 hours where competition is highest.

 

 

Now let's look at the old VP system.

For both NA and EU:

FIRST	5	5	5	5	5	5	5	5	5	5	5	5
SECOND	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	4
THIRD	3	3	3	3	3	3	3	3	3	3	3	3

 

Let's assume prime time has four slots similar to NA.

Off hour team that get first place in all off hour time slots but gets third place in the four prime time slots:

3+3+3+3+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5 = 52

Prime time based team that gets first place in all four prime time slots but gets third place in all off hours slots:

5+5+5+5+3+3+3+3+3+3+3+3 = 44

A third team that gets second place in all slots just for the sake of comparison:

4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4 = 48

 

As we can see, a much wider variance in terms of percentage between prime time heavy team and off hour heavy team for NA. If this was for EU, the variance would be even bigger (54 vs 42) since EU would have three prime time slots instead of four following the assumption from the new VP distribution.

Edited July 27 by A Hamster.2580

[Dawdler.8521]

I'm not so sure what the analysis is. A team that is dominating is likely to winning off-prime overall too. It has to be pretty extreme for your scenarios of teams winning prime and loosing everywhere else to occur, day after day. Ultimately the difference is +100% for second place, +200% for first place which lead to a massive difference between the winner and the looser of a matchup. As time goes on, differences will only widen.

But this week will be the first "real" new VP week due to the bugs last week so I guess we'll find out how it ends.

[A Hamster.2580]

1 minute ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

I'm not so sure what the analysis is. A team that is dominating is likely to winning off-prime overall too. It has to be pretty extreme for your scenarios of teams winning prime and loosing everywhere else to occur, day after day. Ultimately the difference is +100% for second place, +200% for first place which lead to a massive difference between the winner and the looser of a matchup. As time goes on, differences will only widen.

But this week will be the first "real" new VP week due to the bugs last week so I guess we'll find out how it ends.

It's an analysis between the old VP system and the new VP system. Also between an off hour heavy team and a prime time heavy team. I guess I will edit in the old VP system too.

It's not an analysis on WR. And yes, a team that is dominating in both prime time and off hours time slots like you said would win regardless of whether we use the old or new VP system.

[One more for the road.8950]

The new VP system is turned off for now, and we don't even know if it comes back the same.

[Dawdler.8521]

46 minutes ago, One more for the road.8950 said:

The new VP system is turned off for now, and we don't even know if it comes back the same.

Ah I never even check the scores since last week lol. Scores are fairly low now yes.

Edited July 27 by Dawdler.8521

[bq pd.2148]

1 hour ago, A Hamster.2580 said:

So what do you guys think? I think these are a lot closer than what many here have lead us to believe.

An EU prime time heavy team can still ultimately get third place if all they have is prime time players.

the scoring does not at all take into account how close the skirmishes are, prime time skirmishes usually are much closer than off hours.  but if you get 2nd place by 5% war score difference you still need to work the entire days off hours to compensate.

how about this: the pool of victory points per skirmish remains as with the new system, but they get distributed in accordance to relative war score in the skirmish.

victory points were once introduced to reduce off hour effect as ppk was not really much and tiered object in off hours provided too much war score over the day, but if we already have lower victory point pools based on activity now, we can weight them again based on war score.

[Spiral.3724]

A dev said on a youtube video that they wanted to decrease "unhealthy gaming behavior", i.e. playing 16 hours a day/night. 

I think they're trying to adjust the scoring in preparation for upcoming tournaments, which was the last time guilds were raiding 24/7 to try to win, and then getting burnt out.

But in my opinion, it's unfair to punish off-hours players, OCX players, and night-owls like myself.

Also, it's none of the beeswax how many hours a day I want to play their game. 

[A Hamster.2580]

4 minutes ago, bq pd.2148 said:

how about this: the pool of victory points per skirmish remains as with the new system, but they get distributed in accordance to relative war score in the skirmish.

Sounds interesting. I tried out various war score weighting in my calculations and it seems to make sense.

[Sheff.4851]

3 hours ago, bq pd.2148 said:

the scoring does not at all take into account how close the skirmishes are, prime time skirmishes usually are much closer than off hours.  but if you get 2nd place by 5% war score difference you still need to work the entire days off hours to compensate.

how about this: the pool of victory points per skirmish remains as with the new system, but they get distributed in accordance to relative war score in the skirmish.

victory points were once introduced to reduce off hour effect as ppk was not really much and tiered object in off hours provided too much war score over the day, but if we already have lower victory point pools based on activity now, we can weight them again based on war score.

Initially, I think this would be worse. It's not uncommon for imbalanced off-hours skirmishes to be 90-10-10 in favor of one team. VP weights that a bit more towards the losing teams, so that the overall score doesn't reflect how utterly blown out those two teams have gotten. But if you weighted VP by warscore, the two losing teams in this case would get fractions of VP. The lower populations and uneven activity in off-hours mean that it's easier for these score blowouts to occur. But I haven't done the actual math against this, and it's a completely answerable question. Kudos to Hamster for sitting down and doing some math in the original post as well.

[bq pd.2148]

1 minute ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Initially, I think this would be worse. It's not uncommon for imbalanced off-hours skirmishes to be 90-10-10 in favor of one team. VP weights that a bit more towards the losing teams, so that the overall score doesn't reflect how utterly blown out those two teams have gotten. But if you weighted VP by warscore, the two losing teams in this case would get fractions of VP.

correct if off hours are completely dominated by one server, that means a lot of their 'player activity score' if you will that is used to create their team has gone into that off hour play and the score would reflect that. however as the VP pools for each skirmish would still be based on the average activity per region, the domination server still gets only a moderate amount compared to primetime.
likewise if the primetime warscore is let say 9k , 8.5k, 8k  then the teams are all still in the game and the losing team(s) is not completely left in the dust.

another reason why i want war score weighting somewhere is so that any contribution matters:

• you don't have enough people on to make 2nd place in the skirmish? currently you might aswell log off to not generate WvW activity without actually contributing to the score.
• your prime time lead went until 11pm, stopping in the mid of a skirmish and now most of your server goes off, the enemy takes over and you still end up last in the skirmish. - should have better logged of early and not provided the enemy another hour of content

 

i think VP pools per skirmish based on region activity distributed by relative war score in the skirmish represents better the average experience in the matchup. a server severly dominating off hours will have an impact on that average experience, similarly a server that is just barely ahead during prime time and literally offline outside of it wont feel like they did dominate the match.

 

[Sheff.4851]

Quote

• your prime time lead went until 11pm, stopping in the mid of a skirmish and now most of your server goes off, the enemy takes over and you still end up last in the skirmish. - should have better logged of early and not provided the enemy another hour of content

Or your prime time lead can pass tag, and somebody else can run for the second hour to preserve the lead.

Quote

• you don't have enough people on to make 2nd place in the skirmish? currently you might aswell log off to not generate WvW activity without actually contributing to the score.

Or you wait until 2nd and 1st place to log off, and then you capture all their objectives in the second half of the skirmish, taking a comeback victory.

You can make up any number of examples. They don't all have to be negative ones. If you think negatively, you're likely to experience negative outcomes.

[bq pd.2148]

7 minutes ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Or your prime time lead can pass tag, and somebody else can run for the second hour to preserve the lead.

Or you wait until 2nd and 1st place to log off, and then you capture all their objectives in the second half of the skirmish, taking a comeback victory.

You can make up any number of examples. They don't all have to be negative ones. If you think negatively, you're likely to experience negative outcomes.

i think you missed the point of those. 
it was not to be negative about a situation specifically, but to show that not all effort put into the match is actually valued by the current system. this i see as a shortcoming of the current system that does not have any war score weighting at all, for i would prefer if every (ones) contribution was valued by the scoring system.

[Sheff.4851]

1 minute ago, bq pd.2148 said:

i think you missed the point of those. 
it was not to be negative about a situation specifically, but to show that not all effort put into the match is actually valued by the current system. this i see as a shortcoming of the current system that does not have any war score weighting at all, for i would prefer if every (ones) contribution was valued by the scoring system.

Right, but WvW is a team sport. Your warscore is about what you did. Your victory points is about what your team did. sPvP is where you want to go for valuing individual contributions to a match, if that's the PvP environment that you want, while WvW is where you want to go if you want to work together with other people across different groups, maps, and timezones.

[bq pd.2148]

1 minute ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Right, but WvW is a team sport. Your warscore is about what you did. Your victory points is about what your team did. sPvP is where you want to go for valuing individual contributions to a match, if that's the PvP environment that you want, while WvW is where you want to go if you want to work together with other people across different groups, maps, and timezones.

both WvW and spvp are competitive modes with a team.
i was not talking about 1 persons individual contribution as very rarely that will have an effect, even with my suggestion a single person will not contribute an entire victory point. it is always a team effort.
my suggestion was merely one to more accurately represent the teams strength over the entire day, you seem to rather want disproportionate rewards for winning a prime time match while diminishing off hour dominance, one can only guess why that be.

[Sheff.4851]

3 hours ago, bq pd.2148 said:

both WvW and spvp are competitive modes with a team.
i was not talking about 1 persons individual contribution as very rarely that will have an effect, even with my suggestion a single person will not contribute an entire victory point. it is always a team effort.
my suggestion was merely one to more accurately represent the teams strength over the entire day, you seem to rather want disproportionate rewards for winning a prime time match while diminishing off hour dominance, one can only guess why that be.

Because more people play in prime. You can look at Hamster's original post to understand why. We'll call "prime" the period from 8pm eastern to 2am eastern. That's three skirmishes. We'll call off-hours everything that doesn't happen during prime.

Under the old system:
Off hour team that get first place in all off hour time slots but gets third place in the four prime time slots:
3+3+3+3+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5 = 52 (86% of a perfect score)

Prime time based team that gets first place in all four prime time slots but gets third place in all off hours slots:
5+5+5+5+3+3+3+3+3+3+3+3 = 44 (73% of a perfect score)

A third team that gets second place in all slots just for the sake of comparison:
4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4 = 48 (80% of a perfect score)

In the new system:
Off hour team that get first place in all off hour time slots but gets third place in the four prime time slots:
11+11+7+9+9+9+13+13+13+13+13+7 = 128 (64% of a perfect score)

Prime time based team that gets first place in all four prime time slots but gets third place in all off hours slots:
33+33+21+3+3+3+4+4+4+4+4+21 = 137 (68.5% of a perfect score)

A third team that gets second place in all slots just for the sake of comparison:
22+22+14+6+6+6+8+8+8+8+8+14 = 130 (65% of a perfect score)

Do you see how, in the new system, the percentages are all smaller, and much closer together? That's because it's a more balanced approach to weighting overall activity. Do you see how, under the old system, the off-hours team generates significantly more score than the prime-time team? This is why the old system was unfair to the timezones that the majority of players actually play in.

[bq pd.2148]

31 minutes ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Because more people play in prime. You can look at Hamster's original post to understand why. We'll call "prime" the period from 8pm eastern to 2am eastern. That's three skirmishes. We'll call off-hours everything that doesn't happen during prime.

Under the old system:
Off hour team that get first place in all off hour time slots but gets third place in the four prime time slots:
3+3+3+3+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5 = 52 (86% of a perfect score)

Prime time based team that gets first place in all four prime time slots but gets third place in all off hours slots:
5+5+5+5+3+3+3+3+3+3+3+3 = 44 (73% of a perfect score)

A third team that gets second place in all slots just for the sake of comparison:
4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4+4 = 48 (80% of a perfect score)

In the new system:
Off hour team that get first place in all off hour time slots but gets third place in the four prime time slots:
11+11+7+9+9+9+13+13+13+13+13+7 = 128 (64% of a perfect score)

Prime time based team that gets first place in all four prime time slots but gets third place in all off hours slots:
33+33+21+3+3+3+4+4+4+4+4+21 = 137 (68.5% of a perfect score)

A third team that gets second place in all slots just for the sake of comparison:
22+22+14+6+6+6+8+8+8+8+8+14 = 130 (65% of a perfect score)

Do you see how, in the new system, the percentages are all smaller, and much closer together? That's because it's a more balanced approach to weighting overall activity. Do you see how, under the old system, the off-hours team generates significantly more score than the prime-time team? This is why the old system was unfair to the timezones that the majority of players actually play in.

glad to see that you just didnt read my post carefully enough and are not actually as stupid as i feared.

i was not saying that the old system was better than the new one. obviously the old one would overvalue the effort per playtime in off hours as there the same amount of VP could be generated with less players.  so handing out more VP per skirmish during more active time is most certainly a step in the right direction.

however even the new system can still be further improved upon. because now you hardly can affort to not win the primetime skirmishes. you rightfully noted that a fixed VP distribution in any given skirmish will reduce the effect of blow outs in that skirmish, but in close skirmishes it actually has the reverse effect: it disproportionately rewards the winner. given that prime time skirmishes are rarely blow outs and account for a very large % of the daily VP, this is still a problem.

because of this i suggested that while we keep the VP pools per skirmish based on region activity, the distribution of the VP of any given skirmish should not be fixed but rather weighted by war score to account for how close the skirmishes were.  lets go over an example. 
EU has 3 primetime skirmishes, 3 deadzone skirmishes and 6 medium ones. lets assume R has 10x the score of G/B during the deadzone,  during the medium skirmishes its a toss between R and G, while during primetime B is in the lead. then the VP could look something like this

R    10   10   10  14  10   11  10  11   15   22   17   10      = 150
G     1     1     1   11  13   11  13  10   20   26   19   10      = 136
B      1     1     1     5    7     8    7    9    25   36   24   10      = 134

the fixed scores from the currently new version would however give for the same match:

R   6    6  6  15  10   15  10  15  10  14  10  15   = 132
G   4   4  4   10  15  10   15  10  20  28  20  10   = 150
B    2   2  2     5    5    5     5     5  30  42  30    5  =  133

the spread is still similar but as you can see despite close performances in some skirmishes one team get disproportionately more/less points than another and thus the actual performance is not accurately captured. especially during prime time i have not often seen the winning team actually score 3x the war score of the 3rd, now with a greater weight on them this does become a problem IMO.

Edited July 28 by bq pd.2148

[Arete.7019]

8 hours ago, bq pd.2148 said:

the scoring does not at all take into account how close the skirmishes are, prime time skirmishes usually are much closer than off hours.  but if you get 2nd place by 5% war score difference you still need to work the entire days off hours to compensate.

how about this: the pool of victory points per skirmish remains as with the new system, but they get distributed in accordance to relative war score in the skirmish.

victory points were once introduced to reduce off hour effect as ppk was not really much and tiered object in off hours provided too much war score over the day, but if we already have lower victory point pools based on activity now, we can weight them again based on war score.

The amount of point spread between 1st-3rd in a skirmish as a % of the total point spread across all skirmishes is equal to the % of total VP assigned to the skirmish for a reason. All this would do is partially unfix the problem VP were intended to solve in the first place by letting runaway scores in offhours TZs gain an unfair amount of points. You can't fix this by saying that they're using up part of their activity budget on offhours players because:
1) We don't know how team creation accounts for offhours players
2) Warscore disparity in prime time is lower because when all maps are active the defenders advantage on home BL/home EBG side means that a large chunk of objectives are almost impossible to flip unless the attackers are totally incompetent
The high disparities in offhours only happen because there are so few players the game mode can't function correctly and almost all points gained in offhours are from passively ticking objectives. This isn't something a team should be rewarded for.

Edited July 28 by Arete.7019

[bq pd.2148]

9 minutes ago, Arete.7019 said:

All this would do is partially unfix the problem VP were intended to solve in the first place by letting runaway scores in offhours TZs gain an unfair amount of points.

not really.  because the VP pool for an off hour skirmish is deliberately lower based on the activity duing that time. if currently the pools are still too large compared to prime time, then those VP pools need to be adjusted. 
exaggerated example:  if only 1% of the total playtime were to occur outside of the 3 prime time skirmishes, then they should also only award 1% of the total VP of that day. then it does not matter if that 1% is heavily skewed towards one team. but if a sizeable amount of playtime occurs in off hours and they are heavily dominated by one team, then this has an equally sizeable impact on the average experience in the match and should be reflected in the score
 

9 minutes ago, Arete.7019 said:

2) Warscore disparity in prime time is lower because when all maps are active the defenders advantage on home BL/home EBG side means that a large chunk of objectives are almost impossible to flip

indeed but why does one team then get 3 times the VP of another if the performance is so close? and this makes up a sizeable chunk of the daily VP, not at all reflecting the actual experience in the game.

Edited July 28 by bq pd.2148

[Arete.7019]

14 minutes ago, bq pd.2148 said:

not really.  because the VP pool for an off hour skirmish is deliberately lower based on the activity duing that time. if currently the pools are still too large compared to prime time, then those VP pools need to be adjusted. 
exaggerated example:  if only 1% of the total playtime were to occur outside of the 3 prime time skirmishes, then they should also only award 1% of the total VP of that day. then it does not matter if that 1% is heavily skewed towards one team. but if a sizeable amount of playtime occurs in off hours and they are heavily dominated by one team, then this has an equally sizeable impact on the average experience in the match and should be reflected in the score

It doesn't take a sizeable amount of playtime to dominate a huge percentage of the offhours warscore, you can do it with <10 dudes in a lot of matches depending on the skirmish. There's also another issue: there are 4, 5 if you want to be generous, guilds that could easily take ~100% of the warscore in the OCX primetime skirmish on NA unless they're matched against each other if they wanted to hit doors instead of logging out. Those groups aren't equal to 4.56% of the population in their worlds (This is the % of total VP in skirmish 5 NA) There are 4 tiers, there literally aren't enough for them to have 2 opponents on each tier, someone is getting screwed going up against them. There are other skirmishes that are even more unfair than this example.
 

Quote

indeed by why does one team then get 3 times the VP of another if the performance is so close? and this makes up a sizeable chunk of the daily VP, not at all reflecting the actual experience in the game.

Because doing that improves the matchup quality for the majority of players. When 20% of the playerbase, or whatever EU skirmish 1 actually is, can't impact their matchup it makes them stop caring about matchups and winning. Like I already explained, warscore is not a great measure of performance. The potential and difficulty in gaining it is dramatically different depending on the time of day. Getting a win in warscore takes a reasonable effort, getting a massive disparity in warscore requires a huge imbalance. The main effect of your change would be to push offhours heavy teams to higher tiers, which is the entire thing that the VP changes were trying to prevent.

Edited July 28 by Arete.7019

[bq pd.2148]

18 minutes ago, Arete.7019 said:

It doesn't take a sizeable amount of playtime to dominate a huge percentage of the offhours warscore, you can do it with <10 dudes in a lot of matches depending on the skirmish. There's also another issue: there are 4, 5 if you want to be generous, guilds that could easily take ~100% of the warscore in the OCX primetime skirmish on NA unless they're matched against each other if they wanted to hit doors instead of logging out. Those groups aren't equal to 4.56% of the population in their worlds (This is the % of total VP in skirmish 5 NA) There are 4 tiers, there literally aren't enough for them to have 2 opponents on each tier, someone is getting screwed going up against them. There are other skirmishes that are even more unfair than this example.

as i said, that would be an issue of the currently set VP pools for each skirmish, which are based on what anet said the activity levels are.  i am fairly certain the disparities in activity are currently not accurately captured in the score and the total VP per skirmish probably need to be higher in more active time slots to fine tune them properly.

if 10 dudes are dominating the match in those times, again just give those times a total VP pool that actually reflects that activity in relation to the rest.

i am aware that at such times the skirmishes can be very one sided,  but that should still be reflected in the score based on how much that time actually matters for the average experience.

28 minutes ago, Arete.7019 said:

Because doing that improves the matchup quality for the majority of players. When 20% of the playerbase, or whatever EU skirmish 1 actually is, can't impact their matchup it makes them stop caring about matchups and winning. Like I already explained, warscore is not a great measure of performance. The potential and difficulty in gaining it is dramatically different depending on the time of day. Getting a win in warscore takes a reasonable effort, getting a massive disparity in warscore requires a huge imbalance. The main effect of your change would be to push offhours heavy teams to higher tiers

well 20% of the playerbase should have about 20% impact on the matches, is what i am advocating for.

yes the game is played differently based on the time of day, at very active times you will need to fight for every step you take and at inactive times its more a game of hide and seek or who can capture faster.  yes the skill sets required will differ and in offhours you get more war score for less effort, that is why skirmishes where introduced with VP to keep track of skirmish victories.  now that the VP pool for the off hour skirmishes is lower,  we also get less VP for the same war score thus your concern that off hours generate war score too easily is already addressed in the smaller VP pools.  i do not want off hours to generate more total VP.

my suggested change would not necessarily push off hours heavy teams to higher tiers, but in general more active/effective teams to higher tiers. if your team just barely wins prime time matches and provides 0 content outside of it, you have no reason to go to higher tiers.

43 minutes ago, Arete.7019 said:

which is the entire thing that the VP changes were trying to prevent.

as i understand the VP changes are not there to move servers to specific tiers based on their playstyle but to make it so that the playtime of everyone on the team has the same value.  as said above 20% of players should have about 20% impact on the match up.

my suggestions alleviate the pressure to win the prime time matches, as those are usually the closest in performance of the 3 teams and thus the most unfairly treated skirmishes with these fixed VP, especially at those rates where the winner gets 3 times the VP of the 3rd.

yet for me personally the more important part is that everyones playtime is actually valued to begin with, which fixed VP per skirmish are preventing. i think this is important, especially if winning is to be rewarded at some point.
with fixed scores and playtime mattering for team building, one would try to get the best placement in the skirmish that the team can, with the least amount of play hours to not negatively affect the next team building. this is terrible for a game mode where players provide each other content and you want people to actually play. the winning move should never be not to play.
earlier i gave examples where it would be better to log off if you are last and wont be able to make 2nd place. but same is the case if you are winning, i get the same VP for winning barely as i get by absolutely dominating the skirmish, but the latter will accumulate a ton of play hours.

 

[Arete.7019]

10 minutes ago, bq pd.2148 said:

as i said, that would be an issue of the currently set VP pools for each skirmish, which are based on what anet said the activity levels are.  i am fairly certain the disparities in activity are currently not accurately captured in the score and the total VP per skirmish probably need to be higher in more active time slots to fine tune them properly.

if 10 dudes are dominating the match in those times, again just give those times a total VP pool that actually reflects that activity in relation to the rest.

i am aware that at such times the skirmishes can be very one sided,  but that should still be reflected in the score based on how much that time actually matters for the average experience.

Its not that I think anet's numbers are that far off, its that:
1) Players in those skirmishes are highly disorganized and easy to dominate for the small amount of competent groups playing at those times
2) There aren't enough competent groups to possibly spread across all worlds in all skirmishes, so there will be giant disparities in many of them
 

Quote

well 20% of the playerbase should have about 20% impact on the matches, is what i am advocating for.

yes the game is played differently based on the time of day, at very active times you will need to fight for every step you take and at inactive times its more a game of hide and seek or who can capture faster.  yes the skill sets required will differ and in offhours you get more war score for less effort, that is why skirmishes where introduced with VP to keep track of skirmish victories.  now that the VP pool for the off hour skirmishes is lower,  we also get less VP for the same war score thus your concern that off hours generate war score too easily is already addressed in the smaller VP pools.  i do not want off hours to generate more total VP.

my suggested change would not necessarily push off hours heavy teams to higher tiers, but in general more active/effective teams to higher tiers. if your team just barely wins prime time matches and provides 0 content outside of it, you have no reason to go to higher tiers.

 

They wouldn't have a proportional amount of impact with your changes though. The spread is the entire mechanism that determines who is winning or losing, not the total amount of points gained in a skirmish. Primetime could give 500/499/498 points and it would have less impact than an offhours skirmish that gave 5/3/1.
 

Quote

as i understand the VP changes are not there to move servers to specific tiers based on their playstyle but to make it so that the playtime of everyone on the team has the same value.  as said above 20% of players should have about 20% impact on the match up.

This is fair, making each player have an equal impact is also an important part of the VP changes.
 

Quote

my suggestions alleviate the pressure to win the prime time matches, as those are usually the closest in performance of the 3 teams and thus the most unfairly treated skirmishes with these fixed VP, especially at those rates where the winner gets 3 times the VP of the 3rd.

yet for me personally the more important part is that everyones playtime is actually valued to begin with, which fixed VP per skirmish are preventing. i think this is important, especially if winning is to be rewarded at some point.
with fixed scores and playtime mattering for team building, one would try to get the best placement in the skirmish that the team can, with the least amount of play hours to not negatively affect the next team building. this is terrible for a game mode where players provide each other content and you want people to actually play. the winning move should never be not to play.
earlier i gave examples where it would be better to log off if you are last and wont be able to make 2nd place. but same is the case if you are winning, i get the same VP for winning barely as i get by absolutely dominating the skirmish, but the latter will accumulate a ton of play hours.

By lowering the spread in prime time matchups you'd be giving a larger percentage (and therefore larger influence on matchup position) to other skirmishes. This directly reduces the impact players in that timezone have on a match. You can even see this in your earlier post where the offhours heavy red server moves to 1st instead of the more primetime balanced green server. The majority of players in that region will have better matchups if the green server advances and red doesn't because a lot of red's win would be coming from a very low population TZ.

I agree that there is potential for play hour manipulation with the current system, but I don't think in the real world this is an actual problem. There are few groups that will log out when good content is available and few groups that will keep playing when no content is online. I'd also be very surprised in anet doesn't take multiple weeks or months of data for those calculations to make it harder to game the system.

[Dawdler.8521]

8 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Initially, I think this would be worse. It's not uncommon for imbalanced off-hours skirmishes to be 90-10-10 in favor of one team. VP weights that a bit more towards the losing teams, so that the overall score doesn't reflect how utterly blown out those two teams have gotten. But if you weighted VP by warscore, the two losing teams in this case would get fractions of VP. The lower populations and uneven activity in off-hours mean that it's easier for these score blowouts to occur. But I haven't done the actual math against this, and it's a completely answerable question. Kudos to Hamster for sitting down and doing some math in the original post as well.

Fairly easy to restrict by adding upper limits to such a scaling. If you gave +2 points instead of +1 points it still wouldnt be close to the new VP system of 2x/3x lol. 

Either way it's really the same thing that made ranked PvP a mess - didnt matter if you lost 100/500 or 499/500, the ranking system punished you. Which would have been fine if it was another match or a couple to even it out, but no it was like 5-7+ wins in a row you needed to even nullify that loss. And then you lost the next match because someone went AFK. It just had a feeling of being hopeless.

That's pretty much how I look at the new VP scoring. You lost a couple prime skirmishes, hopelessly behind might as well give up 🤷‍♂️
In practice maybe you could make up for it but I aint playing 10+ hours just to balance out what someone else played 2 hours for.

[Mabi black.1824]

17 hours ago, A Hamster.2580 said:

So what do you guys think?

how can you just think that treating players differently in the same game because they earn points differently while playing the same game, with a good chance that he played a skirmish at the limit almost continuously outnumbered and managed to win and despite this he will count less than another player,   who perhaps won without commitment (because there are 70 guild men in voice) I find it really crazy. how crazy your analysis is. It doesn't matter a 24-hour feedback where it takes you. The player is only interested in the 2 hours of play it puts in. when he plays. and he will ask you for an absurd reason for which his victory points are worth 6 while someone else's are worth 42. pure madness. 

Clearly it is something done without thinking too much about it. Clearly it is something you need to cancel ASAP. But do you really need someone to explain how out of place this solution is? I can't believe it.

[bq pd.2148]

5 hours ago, Arete.7019 said:

Its not that I think anet's numbers are that far off, its that:
1) Players in those skirmishes are highly disorganized and easy to dominate for the small amount of competent groups playing at those times
2) There aren't enough competent groups to possibly spread across all worlds in all skirmishes, so there will be giant disparities in many of them

indeed we will not have 24/7 balanced skill levels of the players, not just in off hours, we don't even have enough sizeable alliances to give every team decent prime time fighting competence. and as off hours have over all less activity, the disparities in organization/competence are much more apparent. yet i still think that this then is actually part of the reality of the match and should be impacting the score - not deciding matches by itself ofc, if the activity at that time is overall low.

5 hours ago, Arete.7019 said:

They wouldn't have a proportional amount of impact with your changes though. The spread is the entire mechanism that determines who is winning or losing, not the total amount of points gained in a skirmish. Primetime could give 500/499/498 points and it would have less impact than an offhours skirmish that gave 5/3/1.

if prime time points are this close, it would indicate that the teams are rather equal in competence at that time, if additionally one of the teams is domination outside of prime time, why shouldn't they be winning the match? wouldn't that make them overall more active or more efficient?
 

5 hours ago, Arete.7019 said:

By lowering the spread in prime time matchups you'd be giving a larger percentage (and therefore larger influence on matchup position) to other skirmishes. This directly reduces the impact players in that timezone have on a match. You can even see this in your earlier post where the offhours heavy red server moves to 1st instead of the more primetime balanced green server. The majority of players in that region will have better matchups if the green server advances and red doesn't because a lot of red's win would be coming from a very low population TZ.

now in my example you are right, red probably does get too many points.

but here is the thing:
lets say hypothetically 80% of overall play hours happen in a single skirmish. a VP distribution in the current style with 1:2:3  ratio would mean that no other skirmish has any impact on the match at all if actually 80% of the VP are handed out there.  because of this the VP pool disparity between more active and less active skirmishes right now is lower than it most likely should.  i mean we have skirmishes with single digit k+d here in EU inside the deadzone while always in the thousands during prime time, can't tell me that the current scoring does represent that.
if the VP from that pool is however weighted by war score in that skirmish, we can allow the skirmish to actually have the 80% impact that it should. should the score be close enough that most of the score difference is still generated in off hours, then we have a very balanced match and nice average experience to begin with. it wouldn't much matter in terms of content the teams provide, which one goes up or down.
 

Edited July 28 by bq pd.2148

[Sheff.4851]

2 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

how can you just think that treating players differently in the same game because they earn points differently while playing the same game, with a good chance that he played a skirmish at the limit almost continuously outnumbered and managed to win and despite this he will count less than another player,   who perhaps won without commitment (because there are 70 guild men in voice) I find it really crazy. how crazy your analysis is. It doesn't matter a 24-hour feedback where it takes you. The player is only interested in the 2 hours of play it puts in. when he plays. and he will ask you for an absurd reason for which his victory points are worth 6 while someone else's are worth 42. pure madness. 

Clearly it is something done without thinking too much about it. Clearly it is something you need to cancel ASAP. But do you really need someone to explain how out of place this solution is? I can't believe it.

If there's 70 guild men in voice, that sounds like there's 70 people who are committed to playing. I think people have done a pretty good job in this thread of explaining both sides of it.