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

[Mabi black.1824]

3 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

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.

But what is your assumption that 70 men should be considered ''different'' compared to 35 other men? But where is the logic or common sense part here? Are they playing the same game or not? rather, they are created 2 distinct and separate WVWs. Points have a value for WVW ''First Night'' and points will have another value in WVW ''Second Night'' you can come up with any name you prefer. 2 scores 2 rankings 2 different games, but this Clockwork soup is really absurd

Edited July 28 by Mabi black.1824

[A Hamster.2580]

6 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

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. 

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.

Edited July 28 by A Hamster.2580

[Experimentee.7612]

As I have mentioned in another thread,. the whole concept of applying weights based on timezones is ridiculous. The real problem here is that there are unbalanced teams, a problem that has been around since launch, but perhaps felt particularly nowadays in off-peak times for a game that is 12 years old. 

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. 

If you are wondering how you might achieve balanced teams, an option could be to artificially balance the teams by scaling up the score generated by the teams 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/scores at all times of the day.

 

 

Edited July 28 by Experimentee.7612

[A Hamster.2580]

18 minutes 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 the victory points gained by the 5v5v5 affect where the 70v70v70 will be placed in the next matchup and vice versa so this team reward should be rewarded proportionately to make the game mode competitive.

Edited July 28 by A Hamster.2580

[Experimentee.7612]

5 minutes ago, A Hamster.2580 said:

Because the victory points gained by the 5v5v5 affects where the 70v70v70 will be placed in the next matchup and vice versa so this team reward should be rewarded proportionately to make the game mode competitive.

This is a different problem entirely. Scoring and weights should not be used to address this at all. 

The problem you are describing here is that there is a lack of consensus within a team over the type of matchups it would like to attract.

I agree with you that this is a problem.

To solve it, I think we could go back to 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.

[Riba.3271]

New VP system just doesn't work. Imagine if you payed dayworkers more than nightworkers, just because there are more of them. They play exactly same amount of hours and do same work, why should they be paid less?

Ok, maybe the goal was to incentivise that everyone plays primetime (works mornings).... But it is not real life job but a game and comes after so many real life things. Furthermore statement behind new victory point system release wasn't "play primetime and stop playing other timezones" but "if there are more workers at your preferred timezone, you get paid more".

Edited July 28 by Riba.3271

[bq pd.2148]

1 hour ago, Riba.3271 said:

New VP system just doesn't work. Imagine if you payed dayworkers more than nightworkers, just because there are more of them. They play exactly same amount of hours and do same work, why should they be paid less?

you get the same rewardtrack progress regardless of the activity in your time slot. that is the equivalent of the pay to the individual worker here.

the overall business expenses for wages and the total work done however is a lot more during the day, if there are a lot more people working then.  otherwise, what do you pay all those people for if they cant get things done?

in WvW you might be able to hold all maps with 20 people at night, but no chance to do that at prime time. there is simply more work to be done then, so more points awarded for that.

Edited July 28 by bq pd.2148

[Arete.7019]

3 hours ago, Experimentee.7612 said:

As I have mentioned in another thread,. the whole concept of applying weights based on timezones is ridiculous. The real problem here is that there are unbalanced teams, a problem that has been around since launch, but perhaps felt particularly nowadays in off-peak times for a game that is 12 years old. 

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. 

If you are wondering how you might achieve balanced teams, an option could be to artificially balance the teams by scaling up the score generated by the teams 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/scores at all times of the day.

 

 

If 20% of your population plays in one skirmish and 8.58% of the population plays across 3 skirmishes, you can't give each skirmish the same amount of points without that 20% of the playerbase getting screwed on their ability to determine the outcome of matchups. 8.58% of players in those three skirmishes are gaining far more points per player than the 20% of players in the single skirmish.

Now imagine that the skirmish with 20% of the playerbase always wins, while the 3 skirmishes with 8.58% of the playerbase always lose. In this alternate reality numbers are exactly equal in each skirmish for every team and VP gained is the old 5/4/3. Can you see why the players in the 20% population skirmish might be upset that the VP given is equal regardless of population?

[Arete.7019]

11 hours ago, bq pd.2148 said:

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.
 

Yeah, but I think where we're at odds here is that you're overrating how viable warscore is for measuring the difference between teams in prime time. I believe a team could easily be much stronger in prime time but only win warscore by a relatively small margin, while a team that is moderately stronger in offhours could easily gain a massive margin on warscore.

Quote

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?
 

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.

I don't think the current VP are significantly out of line with the real populations, you can take a look at this spreadsheet I made with data from two weeks ago https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y65Sh8-PuB5nEGAV1sGlFgYVEjfCqb7t93tpZxiR150/edit?usp=sharing. % activity on the summary pages is equal to the % of total K+D in the region. K+D as an activity measure probably somewhat overvalues prime time and undervalues offhours, so I wouldn't be surprised if the % of total VP is equal to the % of population per skirmish.

[bq pd.2148]

4 hours ago, Arete.7019 said:

Yeah, but I think where we're at odds here is that you're overrating how viable warscore is for measuring the difference between teams in prime time. I believe a team could easily be much stronger in prime time but only win warscore by a relatively small margin, while a team that is moderately stronger in offhours could easily gain a massive margin on warscore.

could you elaborate on this a bit more?
yes the war scores are often much closer, but how can you then tell that one team does perform much better?

PPK being a more relevant factor in the prime time skirmishes IMO has quite a factor for your perception here.
lets say G when figting B has 50% win rate in fights but either has only 10% win rate against R. some might say R is a lot stronger here, when it comes to direct combat encounters. however similar to spvp the match is not only won by having a stronger teamfight presence, if the team that would lose the team fight properly out-rotates  the other, they might still win.
in WvW that would mean G and B dodging R, getting more PPK from each other. R now has to utilize it to get a greater zone control and keep B+G busy trying to dodge the fights instead of getting ahead fighting among themselves. typically R will fail at that, hard. that is why the skirmishes tend to be closer in war score.
-> R is stronger in direct encounters but did not perform significantly better, thus is not awarded significantly more points.

 

4 hours ago, Arete.7019 said:

I don't think the current VP are significantly out of line with the real populations, you can take a look at this spreadsheet I made with data from two weeks ago https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y65Sh8-PuB5nEGAV1sGlFgYVEjfCqb7t93tpZxiR150/edit?usp=sharing. % activity on the summary pages is equal to the % of total K+D in the region. K+D as an activity measure probably somewhat overvalues prime time and undervalues offhours, so I wouldn't be surprised if the % of total VP is equal to the % of population per skirmish.

very nice sheet!
indeed K+D is not quite accurate for measuring activity as it requires people to actually fight each other.
will see if i can add war score weighted VP version for comparison when i return from work later.

[Mabi black.1824]

14 hours 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.

Be patient. But in your opinion in a 70vs50 skirmish in prime time, where the first group manages to win, and in a 35vs40 skirmish in the late evening where the same first group manages to win, which group contributed the most for its server/team? Are these 2 group of players playing the same game? But what is your presumption of playing in prime time and having adequate numbers? Have you ever been outnumbered almost all the time? And this condition costs you 42 points, while 2 hours later the same condition costs you 6 points? But you really can't see how broken it is?

[bq pd.2148]

6 hours ago, bq pd.2148 said:

will see if i can add war score weighted VP version for comparison when i return from work later.

@Arete.7019
following up on this:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11xTK8itFfoqowqR62PF4lKlpL5sVq_WJZbqDQ-xFHLM/edit?usp=sharing

firstly i did find a mistake in your version while editing, the NA tables have their 2nd max VP skirmish with 2x 2nd place but no 3rd place so 33 / 22 / 22.

its not perfectly rounded and all what i did, basically just truncated the VP to be given and distributed the left overs based on who i rounded down the most, this still led to some skirmishes handing out 1 VP too much, so that is listed there as 'additional VP' on the summary page.

while you have in your notes there that a high % for the spread is better as it means the match is closer, personally i think that should come mainly from balanced teams or other in game incentives to have the 2 currently losing teams gang up on the winner so that the experience is more balanced.
but at the end IMO the score should reflect the experience of the match, tho i can see that some might want the scoring system itself help out the underperforming teams.

Edited July 29 by bq pd.2148

[Arete.7019]

6 hours ago, bq pd.2148 said:

could you elaborate on this a bit more?
yes the war scores are often much closer, but how can you then tell that one team does perform much better?

PPK being a more relevant factor in the prime time skirmishes IMO has quite a factor for your perception here.
lets say G when figting B has 50% win rate in fights but either has only 10% win rate against R. some might say R is a lot stronger here, when it comes to direct combat encounters. however similar to spvp the match is not only won by having a stronger teamfight presence, if the team that would lose the team fight properly out-rotates  the other, they might still win.
in WvW that would mean G and B dodging R, getting more PPK from each other. R now has to utilize it to get a greater zone control and keep B+G busy trying to dodge the fights instead of getting ahead fighting among themselves. typically R will fail at that, hard. that is why the skirmishes tend to be closer in war score.
-> R is stronger in direct encounters but did not perform significantly better, thus is not awarded significantly more points.

I think you pretty much get it, its very difficult to get a large advantage in prime time because dodging fights and especially because hiding in objectives is so strong. T3 EU this week is a good example https://imgur.com/a/kBP6DKr. Check out the prime time skirmishs and skirmish 5, 17, 29 where blue side is dominating. If VP was proportional to warscore the spread would be 11.4 VP in 5, 10.3 in 17. Compared to 13 and 25 where the spread would be 17.7 and 2.5. Green doesn't even win skirmish 13 despite being a stronger team than red. Warscore isn't doing a great job of measuring team strength.

[Dawdler.8521]

7 hours ago, bq pd.2148 said:

indeed K+D is not quite accurate for measuring activity as it requires people to actually fight each other.

If we measure activity by the number of people AFK in spawn or the amount of team messages per second I am fairly sure it wouldn’t be better.

[bq pd.2148]

50 minutes ago, Arete.7019 said:

I think you pretty much get it, its very difficult to get a large advantage in prime time because dodging fights and especially because hiding in objectives is so strong. T3 EU this week is a good example https://imgur.com/a/kBP6DKr. Check out the prime time skirmishs and skirmish 5, 17, 29 where blue side is dominating. If VP was proportional to warscore the spread would be 11.4 VP in 5, 10.3 in 17. Compared to 13 and 25 where the spread would be 17.7 and 2.5. Green doesn't even win skirmish 13 despite being a stronger team than red. Warscore isn't doing a great job of measuring team strength.

i didn't have quite enough time to elaborate on that enough earlier.

i don't think dodging fights or hiding in structures is much of the reason why the skirmishes in prime time tend to be more balanced, i think the main reason is simply that while a team might have a tendency to win direct fights, the other teams are still active and contributing to their score in large numbers. the fact that simply numbers wise the teams are more even is the reason why the score is more even.


lets run some random number example:

lets say the average G player generates about 55 war score per 2 hours, the average R player 60 war score and the average B player 50. now the average war score will change based on time of day in theory because of larger % passive points (ppt) but for simplicity we shall ignore that part at the moment as it would just be more or less a multiplicative modifier. by leaving such modifiers away, we also get a better picture on the relative amount of 'work' put in by the teams at the time.

during night you have an average of  7 G , 5 R and 20 B online.  so you end up with  385 G ,  300 R and 1000 B. very one sided and actually feel like that for anyone playing at that time.
during prime time you might have  160 G , 170 R and 150 B and get  8800 G,  10200 R, 7500 B.  red has more people online and they play on average better, but the other teams also have people around that do stuff.

optimally the VP pools of the 2 skirmishes will proportional to activity, in this case 32:480. then weighting the VP per skirmish based on war score:
night total score: 1685   ,  prime time total score = 26500
G= 32*(385/1685) + 480*(8800/26500) ~ 166.71
R= 32*(300/1685) + 480*(10200/26500)~ 190.45
B= 32*(1000/1685) + 480*(7500/26500)~ 154.84

the results after those 2 skirmishes are as expected, B has barely more hours total than G but the lowest average contribution so is last, R has the most hours total and the best average contribution and is thus clearly first, despite being overrun during the night and despite the prime time match looking so much closer in performance.

edit about the t3 example:
i understand that the spread is greater, but have you played in that match during night time? did you see how one sided it is? that is part of the matches reality and should be represented in score. now across the entire day, those night skirmishes only have the tiniest amount of the overall play hours and thus should have little impact on the total score, yet that impact of those onesided skirmishes should still mostly be for blue.
in skirmish 13, green indeed does get a few more kills than red. is that why you think they are 'stronger' ? WvW is not a deathmatch, there is more to it. there are structures to fight over. given that red still won the skirmish, by not just a little, indicates that green was just sitting somewhere farming kills instead of getting their kills by fighting over objectives, thus green was certainly worse as a team and rightfully ended up behind red.

Edited July 29 by bq pd.2148

[Arete.7019]

50 minutes ago, bq pd.2148 said:

firstly i did find a mistake in your version while editing, the NA tables have their 2nd max VP skirmish with 2x 2nd place but no 3rd place so 33 / 22 / 22.

Fixed that, thanks
 

Quote

@Arete.7019
following up on this:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11xTK8itFfoqowqR62PF4lKlpL5sVq_WJZbqDQ-xFHLM/edit?usp=sharing

its not perfectly rounded and all what i did, basically just truncated the VP to be given and distributed the left overs based on who i rounded down the most, this still led to some skirmishes handing out 1 VP too much, so that is listed there as 'additional VP' on the summary page.

while you have in your notes there that a high % for the spread is better as it means the match is closer, personally i think that should come mainly from balanced teams or other in game incentives to have the 2 currently losing teams gang up on the winner so that the experience is more balanced.
but at the end IMO the score should reflect the experience of the match, tho i can see that some might want the scoring system itself help out the underperforming teams.

I wasn't trying to say that the higher % is better, just that it meant 1st/3rd were closer. I think the new distribution of 50%/33%/17% for 1st/2nd/3rd is fine, having a bigger gap encourages players to go for the win harder because it matters more. I definitely agree that there could be much better in-game incentives to focus the winner. T3 structures being terrible to fight in and the winning server being the most likely to have T3 structures is the main thing that leads to the winner not being focused imo.
 

1 minute ago, bq pd.2148 said:

i didn't have quite enough time to elaborate on that enough earlier.

i don't think dodging fights or hiding in structures is much of the reason why the skirmishes in prime time tend to be more balanced, i think the main reason is simply that while a team might have a tendency to win direct fights, the other teams are still active and contributing to their score in large numbers. the fact that simply numbers wise the teams are more even is the reason why the score is more even.


lets run some random number example:

lets say the average G player generates about 55 war score per 2 hours, the average R player 60 war score and the average B player 50. now the average war score will change based on time of day in theory because of larger % passive points (ppt) but for simplicity we shall ignore that part at the moment as it would just be more or less a multiplicative modifier. by leaving such modifiers away, we also get a better picture on the relative amount of 'work' put in by the teams at the time.

during night you have an average of  7 G , 5 R and 20 B online.  so you end up with  385 G ,  300 R and 1000 B. very one sided and actually feel like that for anyone playing at that time.
during prime time you might have  160 G , 170 R and 150 B and get  8800 G,  10200 R, 7500 B.  red has more people online and they play on average better, but the other teams also have people around that do stuff.

optimally the VP pools of the 2 skirmishes will proportional to activity, in this case 32:480. then weighting the VP per skirmish based on war score:
night total score: 1685   ,  prime time total score = 26500
G= 32*(385/1685) + 480*(8800/26500) ~ 166.71
R= 32*(300/1685) + 480*(10200/26500)~ 190.45
B= 32*(1000/1685) + 480*(7500/26500)~ 154.84

the results after those 2 skirmishes are as expected, B has barely more hours total than G but the lowest average contribution so is last, R has the most hours total and the best average contribution and is thus clearly first, despite being overrun during the night and despite the prime time match looking so much closer in performance.

Yeah, I think I get what you're saying, but my problem is that what if a B player during the night is doing 60 avg score and a B player during the day is doing 50? You could have exactly equal populations at any skirmish and it still wouldn't end up fair if most of the spread comes from offhours.

[bq pd.2148]

1 minute ago, Arete.7019 said:

Yeah, I think I get what you're saying, but my problem is that what if a B player during the night is doing 60 avg score and a B player during the day is doing 50? You could have exactly equal populations at any skirmish and it still wouldn't end up fair if most of the spread comes from offhours.

but wouldn't the spread be weighted the same as the VP pools? which should be based on activity and thus the spread would also be based on that.

[Arete.7019]

4 minutes ago, bq pd.2148 said:

but wouldn't the spread be weighted the same as the VP pools? which should be based on activity and thus the spread would also be based on that.

So if you want the % of total warscore in a skirmish to gain an equal % of the VP for that skirmish. The VP is based on activity yeah, but my whole point is that warscore isn't a perfect measure of team strength. This is my only real disagreement, if warscore perfectly assessed team strength then weighting VP from it exactly would be fine, but with warscore being a fuzzy measure the current split is better. I brought up that example of EU T3 this week because I really doubt that blue is 90% of the strength in those offhours skirmishes, but they'd be getting 90% of the score. Same thing for the primetime skirmishes.

[bq pd.2148]

38 minutes ago, Arete.7019 said:

The VP is based on activity yeah, but my whole point is that warscore isn't a perfect measure of team strength. This is my only real disagreement, if warscore perfectly assessed team strength then weighting VP from it exactly would be fine, but with warscore being a fuzzy measure the current split is better.

indeed that seems to be the main thing it is boiling down to.

personally i am not yet clear on how you evaluate a team's strength and i could see that people will likely have different ideas about it.
likewise would you consider for example conquest to accurately capture a team's strength with their scoring system? after all people optimize their play to the scoring, but some aspects might be more important than others for the current way things are and thus the scoring might not capture everyones idea of what makes for a strong team.

war score right now might not be representing what you would consider a teams strength, however it should represent that. we have seen numerous changes to war score itself over the years, like reducing the amount of war score from structures per tick, adding and increasing war score for skills, option war score for stomps, war score changes on capture.
optimizing war score to better represent what people would consider the strength of a team at a given time is simply another task on the way to making the scoring actually competitive. but i don't see how ignoring actual performance during a skirmish can lead to a better scoring, as the current system(s) are doing it.

edit :
one thing that could change about war score for example is when objectives provide their points. right now if you own the entire map, everyone is offline, really everyone - 0 players on the maps-, you still gain massive score. one could change objectives to only grant war score on: a) capture and b) ticks during which a defense event has occurred for the structure, you don't need any manpower to hold a structure that is not contested.
 

Edited July 29 by bq pd.2148

[Sheff.4851]

Quote

one thing that could change about war score for example is when objectives provide their points. right now if you own the entire map, everyone is offline, really everyone - 0 players on the maps-, you still gain massive score. one could change objectives to only grant war score on: a) capture and b) ticks during which a defense event has occurred for the structure, you don't need any manpower to hold a structure that is not contested.

It would be really interesting if objectives only gave warscore if there was an active defense event in that five minute period. Maybe have them give double points if there's an active defense event, just so that defending groups don't feel completely meaningless if there's no current attacking group pumping the score up. But that's a cool idea.

[Zyreva.1078]

9 minutes ago, Sheff.4851 said:

It would be really interesting if objectives only gave warscore if there was an active defense event in that five minute period. Maybe have them give double points if there's an active defense event, just so that defending groups don't feel completely meaningless if there's no current attacking group pumping the score up. But that's a cool idea.

That would basically "punish" players for extended sieges and actually fighting for objectives as opposed to just PvDooring or steamrolling with a huge blob. Because the longer an objective is contested the more score it would generate for the enemy. Big no.

[bq pd.2148]

2 hours ago, Zyreva.1078 said:

That would basically "punish" players for extended sieges and actually fighting for objectives as opposed to just PvDooring or steamrolling with a huge blob. Because the longer an objective is contested the more score it would generate for the enemy. Big no.

my thinking was, that if both teams show up and thus there is a reason why the siege takes time, kills will become another factor that affect the how efficient the attack is.
say it takes long because the enemy throws endless bodies at you? -> worth it for the attackers. it takes long because a select few defenders outplay you? -> worth it for the defenders. further i have seen off hours, like morning squads try to 'farm' massively outnumbered people in their keeps, they run endless circles just to kill 1-2 players at a time, very slowly, while they could easily capture it. this while it might still bind a larger % of the defending players online, actually give them a chance to get more war score for their opponents stupidity.

if structures are only PvDoored, neither side gets an advantage based on how fast their train is. because only score on capture and none fore defense would be awarded.

[Zyreva.1078]

20 hours ago, bq pd.2148 said:

my thinking was, that if both teams show up and thus there is a reason why the siege takes time, kills will become another factor that affect the how efficient the attack is.
say it takes long because the enemy throws endless bodies at you? -> worth it for the attackers. it takes long because a select few defenders outplay you? -> worth it for the defenders. further i have seen off hours, like morning squads try to 'farm' massively outnumbered people in their keeps, they run endless circles just to kill 1-2 players at a time, very slowly, while they could easily capture it. this while it might still bind a larger % of the defending players online, actually give them a chance to get more war score for their opponents stupidity.

You are looking at this only from a zerg pov - but what about small grps? Those will always take longer at taking structures = more score for the enemy and are at higher risk of not succeeding = even more advantage for the enemy, potentially to the point where not playing would be better for your world, even when generating some kills/captures.

Generally such change would mean stacking everyone and running arround in a single grp/zerg/blob would become by far the most efficient way of generating score and splitting up into smaller grps to contest multiple structures at once would become detrimental - but then why even have large maps with so many different objectives when you are supposed to only tackle one at a time?

To elaborate further - if score generated by structures (capture and defense) becomes lower in relation to ppk, then kills become the primary sorce of score and large numbers generally generate more kills than small numbers, even when playing worse in relation (eg. 5 players beating double their numbers still generate a lot less score than 50 ppl beating half their numbers). If score from structures remains high in relation to ppk, then there will be no way a small grp can generate enough kills during sieges to overcome the defense ticks generated for the enemy and sieges only become worth anything if you can take the structure before the next tick happens or if you can farm large amounts of kills - both usually requires large numbers of attackers.

It would basically kill strategic map play and become a contest of who can farm and/or cap faster.

[Experimentee.7612]

On 7/28/2024 at 9:26 PM, Riba.3271 said:

New VP system just doesn't work. Imagine if you payed dayworkers more than nightworkers, just because there are more of them. They play exactly same amount of hours and do same work, why should they be paid less?

Ok, maybe the goal was to incentivise that everyone plays primetime (works mornings).... But it is not real life job but a game and comes after so many real life things. Furthermore statement behind new victory point system release wasn't "play primetime and stop playing other timezones" but "if there are more workers at your preferred timezone, you get paid more".

Exactly!

On 7/28/2024 at 10:47 PM, bq pd.2148 said:

you get the same rewardtrack progress regardless of the activity in your time slot. that is the equivalent of the pay to the individual worker here.

the overall business expenses for wages and the total work done however is a lot more during the day, if there are a lot more people working then.  otherwise, what do you pay all those people for if they cant get things done?

in WvW you might be able to hold all maps with 20 people at night, but no chance to do that at prime time. there is simply more work to be done then, so more points awarded for that.

In prime time, there is more work to be done because you have more opponents, but you also have more people active on your team to do that work. There is no need to award more points.

On 7/29/2024 at 12:30 AM, Arete.7019 said:

If 20% of your population plays in one skirmish and 8.58% of the population plays across 3 skirmishes, you can't give each skirmish the same amount of points without that 20% of the playerbase getting screwed on their ability to determine the outcome of matchups. 8.58% of players in those three skirmishes are gaining far more points per player than the 20% of players in the single skirmish.

Now imagine that the skirmish with 20% of the playerbase always wins, while the 3 skirmishes with 8.58% of the playerbase always lose. In this alternate reality numbers are exactly equal in each skirmish for every team and VP gained is the old 5/4/3. Can you see why the players in the 20% population skirmish might be upset that the VP given is equal regardless of population?

I answered this exact question earlier in the thread to someone else. It is not a problem that should be solved with the scoring changes:

On 7/28/2024 at 8:58 PM, Experimentee.7612 said:

This is a different problem entirely. Scoring and weights should not be used to address this at all. 

The problem you are describing here is that there is a lack of consensus within a team over the type of matchups it would like to attract.

I agree with you that this is a problem.

To solve it, I think we could go back to 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.

 

[bq pd.2148]

1 hour ago, Zyreva.1078 said:

You are looking at this only from a zerg pov - but what about small grps? Those will always take longer at taking structures = more score for the enemy and are at higher risk of not succeeding = even more advantage for the enemy, potentially to the point where not playing would be better for your world, even when generating some kills/captures.

• with the changes to how structures get contested, outside of RBL side keeps any structure can be taken by 3-5 players before the first defense event ends, if there are no defenders. when structures are flipping back and forth, everyone will get the capture points eventually, so it is indeed quite an irrelevant exchange without players competing.
• if you need multiple ticks with completed defense events worth of time to capture a structure, it will only give the enemy more score if they capture it back within less. which if they use the same amount of resources (players), means they did a better job. sure they could use more players to get the structure back faster, the higher investment from their side will net them higher points for that structure exchange in particular, at some cost elsewhere.
• a group running with 50 people has to generate easily 10 times the score of a 5 people group that can also capture things really fast.  so if you capture a structure with 5 people needing 10 ticks with defense events = 50minutes, then defending it enough to make 50 people take 1 tick with completed defense event would even out the amount of points/resources. it is incredibly hard to actually be efficient with too large a blob without having large fights, because of things like siege caps that dont scale, building time taking up a larger portion of the siege or the very fact that the lord does scale up - they wont kill the lord 10 times as fast.

1 hour ago, Zyreva.1078 said:

To elaborate further - if score generated by structures (capture and defense) becomes lower in relation to ppk, then kills become the primary sorce of score and large numbers generally generate more kills than small numbers, even when playing worse in relation (eg. 5 players beating double their numbers still generate a lot less score than 50 ppl beating half their numbers). If score from structures remains high in relation to ppk, then there will be no way a small grp can generate enough kills during sieges to overcome the defense ticks generated for the enemy and sieges only become worth anything if you can take the structure before the next tick happens or if you can farm large amounts of kills - both usually requires large numbers of attackers.

• ofc larger numbers generate more kills. but do they generate more kills per person? i don't know about you but when i solo roam i get a lot more kills than if i were to count what i get in the same time with 50+ people divided by 50+, especially as often in 50vs50 like 10-20 people will run away early enough.
• currently score from structures is indeed very high and you don't even need anyone to be online for that. if those numbers don't increase much with it, then ppk would be a much larger portion of the overall score, especially now that it is 3 (or 4 with stomp) .  it would mostly be kills -> ticks with completed defense events -> dolyaks (escort/kill). capture points should even out mostly with structures flipping back and forth. however i could see removing the scaling for defending higher tiered structures as them holding out longer is already providing the additional points.

1 hour ago, Zyreva.1078 said:

It would basically kill strategic map play and become a contest of who can farm and/or cap faster.

what do you consider strategic map play?
this change would make it so closer to spawn structures should be prioritized as one is more likely to get more score defending them, then the enemy got. but that is already kind of the case as those tend to be the ones currently going up to t3 easier.
you don't need to bother about your opponent having that t3 tower on the other side of the map ticking passively their score up, you worry about that when your zone control reaches up to there, as the enemy does not get any benefit from that uncontested objective.
 

33 minutes ago, Experimentee.7612 said:

In prime time, there is more work to be done because you have more opponents, but you also have more people active on your team to do that work. There is no need to award more points.

you are looking at balance between the sides, i argue about balance between timeslots.
if skirmishes give the same VP regardless of time, then you get more VP/playtime in offhours. making off hours players more valuable than prime time players.
that would be fine from a match balance point of view, if the time spent in off hours then also counts for respectively more  for when teams are build. 

however i do understand if people who do more likely play in primetime as preference or due to RL, would like their time to worth just as much as someone playing at an off hour.
if we assume that teams are build by simply WvW-play hours / participation, then we need to make sure the scoring treats everyones playtime equally.
 

Edited July 30 by bq pd.2148