My server is empty - A solution to balance, and empty teams

[Spadassin.4076]

Even if they add pips to it it wouldn't be a threat to pve content.

[Riba.3271]

You are right that megaservers make more sense for World Restructuring system.

Honestly it isn't that my server is empty, just half the groups are German/French/Spanish and almost all of the remaining are invisible closed squads. Even if go as far as starting an open tag, people ain't gonna join discord channel until it has at least 10 people... Yea, you can play voiceless, but that is pretty bad experience.

So, only way to play WvW properly now is to find a guild. I won't as my times of logging in aren't consistant enough. The change they did to WvW is same as if McDonalds forced people to eat hamburgers with knives and forks... Too much extra commitment for most people.

Edited July 29 by Riba.3271

[One more for the road.8950]

1 hour ago, Spadassin.4076 said:

Perhaps I was on another team. Honestly I have barely played WvW since alliances came up, and I have waited to see the second reset as they promised the algorithm would improve with data. Even friends on large teams have been complaining about lack content/one-sided games.

So you have barely played but you are complaining about empty servers, people on Discord and discussing how to solve it, even if you have no idea if it's actually the case, just on hearsay.

[Spadassin.4076]

57 minutes ago, Riba.3271 said:

You are right that megaservers make more sense for World Restructuring system.

Honestly it isn't that my server is empty, just half the groups are German/French/Spanish and almost all of the remaining are invisible closed squads. Even if go as far as starting an open tag, people ain't gonna join discord channel until it has at least 10 people... Yea, you can play voiceless, but that is pretty bad experience.

So, only way to play WvW properly now is to find a guild. I won't as my times of logging in aren't consistant enough. The change they did to WvW is same as if McDonalds forced people to eat hamburgers with knives and forks... Too much extra commitment for most people.

100% how I feel. Why am I now forced to join guild/alliances and commit being social when I just don't have time for this.

[Spadassin.4076]

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

So you have barely played but you are complaining about empty servers, people on Discord and discussing how to solve it, even if you have no idea if it's actually the case, just on hearsay.

Why don't you find things that alliances are solving and that a megaserver wouldn't? It's easier to criticize than thinking am I right?

[Reztek.7805]

9 hours ago, One more for the road.8950 said:

from guild lists on GW2Mists and other places, you have both roaming guilds and raiding guilds on your team.

Or do you actually not mean "empty" but "not winning"

So? A random page with a random list of names? How long do those guilds play/week? And when do they play?

I ended up on Lyssa this time and so far red is totally outnumbered during prime time. "Their prime time" seems to be the early morning, just like https://www.gw2matchup.com/matchup?id=2-1 suggests.

Edited July 29 by Reztek.7805

[Spadassin.4076]

29 minutes ago, Reztek.7805 said:

So? A random page with a random list of names? How long do those guilds play/week? And when do they play?

I ended up on Lyssa this time and so far red is totally outnumbered during prime time. "Their prime time" seems to be the early morning, just like https://www.gw2matchup.com/matchup?id=2-1 suggests.

We trying our best ❤️ 

I am sure it's boring to you all though, not only us - Megaservers fix this.

Edited July 29 by Spadassin.4076

[Hesione.9412]

4 hours ago, Spadassin.4076 said:

Perhaps I was on another team. Honestly I have barely played WvW since alliances came up, and I have waited to see the second reset as they promised the algorithm would improve with data. Even friends on large teams have been complaining about lack content/one-sided games.

The friends being on large teams explains the lack of content.

[Cyninja.2954]

3 hours ago, Riba.3271 said:

Honestly it isn't that my server is empty, just half the groups are German/French/Spanish and almost all of the remaining are invisible closed squads. Even if go as far as starting an open tag, people ain't gonna join discord channel until it has at least 10 people... Yea, you can play voiceless, but that is pretty bad experience.

That is actually an issue which affects EU far more than NA: language barriers and far more different languages. It be nice if there were language options eventually implemented as select-able options for the sorting algorithm but as of now I am unsure if that is even on the table at Arenanet.

Quote

So, only way to play WvW properly now is to find a guild. I won't as my times of logging in aren't consistant enough. The change they did to WvW is same as if McDonalds forced people to eat hamburgers with knives and forks... Too much extra commitment for most people.

I agree with this sentiment overall but would expand it in that: within the current system there is no proper way to organize public content as effective as within the old server system. Both due to lack of in game options as well as visibility for tags. This used to be handled within some server communities (on discord most often) as well as just "fame" commanders which were known well enough to attract a crowd of players.

Not sure what solution there might be besides completely reworking how information is presented to players in game. On a limited basis the known commanders from the past are now in guilds themselves, which still doesn't help guildless players.

[RisingDawn.5796]

27 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

I agree with this sentiment overall but would expand it in that: within the current system there is no proper way to organize public content as effective as within the old server system. Both due to lack of in game options as well as visibility for tags. This used to be handled within some server communities (on discord most often) as well as just "fame" commanders which were known well enough to attract a crowd of players.

Not sure what solution there might be besides completely reworking how information is presented to players in game. On a limited basis the known commanders from the past are now in guilds themselves, which still doesn't help guildless players.

Guild communities have to advertise their discords on team and map chat basically.

Also they have to coordinate, with other communities which might end up getting matched, but also I've seen some pugs actually ask if there is a tag on voice. Other times there are just chatmanders as per usual though.

Also, speaking of which, many pug commanders of the past were usually part of a guild. They got trained and learned by having their mainly their guild around to support, if there are not many other guilds with active leads around, also whether or not they lead both closed raids and open tags.

When their guild transferred they would be leading on another server, whether it was when we had solo servers or when we had world linkings for 8 years, but they would generally be replaced by other commanders from guilds that stayed, or recently transferred to that server.

Edited July 29 by RisingDawn.5796

[Evenge.4067]

14 hours ago, Spadassin.4076 said:

It would still exist yes. I was in a full server before the alliance. Stomping empty servers is also boring.

In other words, you'll never be happy. 

[Bloodstealer.5978]

Sorry but ANET's answer to this debacle was to delete empty EU servers and move the empty population onto another empty pop server (Palawadan) and think that's balance when t just as empty as the previous matchups.. if you miss the hour that it has some people running then the rest of the day/week is just a frustrating borefest.

WvW is broken and no matter how much garbage they throw at it they simply have no clue to how to make this bs WR work

Edited July 29 by Bloodstealer.5978

[Bloodstealer.5978]

4 hours ago, One more for the road.8950 said:

So you have barely played but you are complaining about empty servers, people on Discord and discussing how to solve it, even if you have no idea if it's actually the case, just on hearsay.

Just so happens this poster is correct though, its the same throughout the matchup tiers, then this weeks debacle with moving players of designated matchups onto something worse without any warning.. ooh and the stealth deletion of some of the matchup teams before reassignment

[willow.8209]

9 hours ago, RisingDawn.5796 said:

I've seen some pugs actually ask if there is a tag on voice.

only time I've seen pugs ask for voice was when the commander was not communicating via text. So the next assumption was, they must be on a voice server they forgot to share. In the end it was found the commander wasn't communicating anywhere. Must have been too new to know how to communicate and play at the same time. Commanding takes a lot of concentration.

[willow.8209]

9 hours ago, RisingDawn.5796 said:

When their guild transferred they would be leading on another server, whether it was when we had solo servers or when we had world linkings for 8 years, but they would generally be replaced by other commanders from guilds that stayed, or recently transferred to that server.

Other option is that some players, especially the ones who don't have a regular schedule, got left in the dust and have no commanders and no one to train commanders, except by chance. (There are a lot of kind players in this game who will help at the moment when asked.)

Edited July 30 by willow.8209

[Cyninja.2954]

9 hours ago, Bloodstealer.5978 said:

Sorry but ANET's answer to this debacle was to delete empty EU servers and move the empty population onto another empty pop server (Palawadan) and think that's balance when t just as empty as the previous matchups.. if you miss the hour that it has some people running then the rest of the day/week is just a frustrating borefest.

WvW is broken and no matter how much garbage they throw at it they simply have no clue to how to make this bs WR work

That's not what happened. Not even in the slightest.

Servers where deleted overall. There are no servers any more. There are shards, which are recreated every 4 weeks currently.

As far as Palawadan, this is the activity for that shard atm:

21.144

kills, 17.805

deaths, 1.19

K/D,  17.27 % PPK,

177 VP

https://gw2mists.com/teams/Palawadan

That is NOT a dead shard. We have sufficient access to data to disprove such claims.

Quote

Just so happens this poster is correct though, its the same throughout the matchup tiers, then this weeks debacle with moving players of designated matchups onto something worse without any warning.. ooh and the stealth deletion of some of the matchup teams before reassignment

As far as tiers, Eu is BACK to 5 tiers, after having been increased to 6 last restructure. That's adjusting to incorrectly increasing tiers from 5 to 6 at the beginning of the event.

There was a warning. There have been months and years of betas and information about the World Restructuring. If you missed all that, that is on you.

Edited July 30 by Cyninja.2954

[Spadassin.4076]

10 hours ago, Evenge.4067 said:

In other words, you'll never be happy. 

Megaservers along with events solve this - see my initial post. It cannot guarantee that you'd win, but that's not the point. It guarantees full maps, and healthy competition at any time.

You could even play in full maps at 7am because the system would dynamically gather everyone on the same instances. In other words we'd be down to 1 or 2 tier instead of 5 during off hours.

Edited July 30 by Spadassin.4076

[Sheff.4851]

14 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

That is actually an issue which affects EU far more than NA: language barriers and far more different languages. It be nice if there were language options eventually implemented as select-able options for the sorting algorithm but as of now I am unsure if that is even on the table at Arenanet.

The problem with giving players something selectable, in addition to their guild, is that it's an additional vector for letting teams stack a server beyond the 500 people in their Alliance. For example, say two 500-man guilds want to work together and get placed on the same team, but because the guild cap is 500, they can't. These two Alliances instruct all of their players to select an infrequently-spoken language (let's say French) as their language for EU, even though their guilds don't speak French, so that the algorithm tries to put them on the same team to respect their language.

This has two negative outcomes. One, a bunch of people who don't actually speak French wind up on a Spanish speaking team, making the play experience worse for native French speakers. And two, these two groups have managed to put themselves on the same team, when the Restructuring system is explicitly trying to prevent that.

It's not to say that Restructuring ignoring the language barrier is good. It's definitely a drawback. But letting players self-select their language preference is worse. Something like locking language selection for the game to your account, and then having Restructuring use that selection, may be something that gets implemented eventually though.

[Spadassin.4076]

2 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

The problem with giving players something selectable, in addition to their guild, is that it's an additional vector for letting teams stack a server beyond the 500 people in their Alliance. For example, say two 500-man guilds want to work together and get placed on the same team, but because the guild cap is 500, they can't. These two Alliances instruct all of their players to select an infrequently-spoken language (let's say French) as their language for EU, even though their guilds don't speak French, so that the algorithm tries to put them on the same team to respect their language.

This has two negative outcomes. One, a bunch of people who don't actually speak French wind up on a Spanish speaking team, making the play experience worse for native French speakers. And two, these two groups have managed to put themselves on the same team, when the Restructuring system is explicitly trying to prevent that.

It's not to say that Restructuring ignoring the language barrier is good. It's definitely a drawback. But letting players self-select their language preference is worse. Something like locking language selection for the game to your account, and then having Restructuring use that selection, may be something that gets implemented eventually though.

Mega servers also solve this by prioritizing your own server when joining a new map. If you have joined a French server you'll typically join a french map. You are still free to join any other map.

[Chaba.5410]

22 hours ago, Spadassin.4076 said:

they promised the algorithm would improve with data

Where did you get this promise from?  It's unclear what data you mean because they've been pulling player data for months ahead of rolling this out.  The improvements are dependent upon how that data is being used.

Here's what was written about team creation recently:

"We have also observed an issue related to time zone population balance that is specifically affecting large guilds. ... We are looking into adjustments to improve on this specific function of the algorithm. In the meantime, if you're in an off-hours guild that has joined a much larger prime-time guild for World Restructuring, you might be able to improve your matchup experience in your preferred time zone by selecting a smaller guild."
 

 

[Chaba.5410]

On 7/28/2024 at 2:47 PM, Spadassin.4076 said:

Problem 1 - Balance

There are probably less than 500 players both capable and active in the EU.

Probably?  What kind of problem is only probably?

Edited July 30 by Chaba.5410

[Cyninja.2954]

2 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

The problem with giving players something selectable, in addition to their guild, is that it's an additional vector for letting teams stack a server beyond the 500 people in their Alliance. For example, say two 500-man guilds want to work together and get placed on the same team, but because the guild cap is 500, they can't. These two Alliances instruct all of their players to select an infrequently-spoken language (let's say French) as their language for EU, even though their guilds don't speak French, so that the algorithm tries to put them on the same team to respect their language.

This has two negative outcomes. One, a bunch of people who don't actually speak French wind up on a Spanish speaking team, making the play experience worse for native French speakers. And two, these two groups have managed to put themselves on the same team, when the Restructuring system is explicitly trying to prevent that.

It's not to say that Restructuring ignoring the language barrier is good. It's definitely a drawback. But letting players self-select their language preference is worse. Something like locking language selection for the game to your account, and then having Restructuring use that selection, may be something that gets implemented eventually though.

I am unsure why you are bringing up infrequent-spoken languages here. The game its self supports 4 languages as of right now: englisch, german, french and spanish. All of which have sufficient players players to fill multiple servers pre WR.

I also don't see how selecting french, if we assume the french community is the smallest, would be a benefit to 2 guilds which have a dominant language of say german. The main issue remains that stacking to many big guilds on a shard becomes an issue, yet that can be solved with proper coding.

Selecting a language preference does not have to override other redistribution algorithms and it shouldn't. Once a language shard is full (and there are arguments to be made that this cap on same language does not have to be 100% of the shards size), the remaining players get placed on the next shard etc.This is entirely dependent on which priority the language selection takes. We also already have similar systems in place in the mega server system, where instances with friends/guildies get proprieties, but getting placed in them is not guaranteed even if they are not full because the deciding algorithm prioritizes emptier maps higher.

For all intents and purposes this goes along the same lines as adjusting the algorithm to not stack multiple large guilds on the same shard, something which should have been in place already.

Technically this might become an issue in the far future once the player population shrinks dramatically, but here we are talking ultra low population and even that could be solved via proper limits being in place.

[Spadassin.4076]

1 hour ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Where did you get this promise from?  It's unclear what data you mean because they've been pulling player data for months ahead of rolling this out.  The improvements are dependent upon how that data is being used.

Here's what was written about team creation recently:

"We have also observed an issue related to time zone population balance that is specifically affecting large guilds. ... We are looking into adjustments to improve on this specific function of the algorithm. In the meantime, if you're in an off-hours guild that has joined a much larger prime-time guild for World Restructuring, you might be able to improve your matchup experience in your preferred time zone by selecting a smaller guild."
 

 

Sounds like you got a technical education. Sometimes language can be purposely vague. A good example is law which gives room for interpretation. In the context of law, it is called the jurisprudence.

"Data" implies both most recent, and new data domains that they might have overlooked. No one cares which is it as it's not the point of the post. We ain't writing their algorithm, nor their BRD, nor designing their data flow.

You didn't even make a new point. I am not sure where you're trying to go. Please clarify.

[Chaba.5410]

9 minutes ago, Spadassin.4076 said:

You didn't even make a new point. I am not sure where you're trying to go. Please clarify.

It sounded like you were expecting this 2nd WR team formation to deliver on some supposed promise that was made.  I don't recall any such promise being made in that regard, only a promise that the algorithm is going to be "iterated" on over time.  A schedule was never promised upon.  Maybe you can point to where this promise was made, which was my original question?

Edited July 30 by Chaba.5410

[Spadassin.4076]

1 hour ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Probably?  What kind of problem is only probably?

I have requested access to the wvw data domain but it's been rejected. This team is gatekeeping their datasets for promotion 🤣.

Honestly, who cares haha. The point is there will always be a stacked server that stomps everyone else. It's a very small player base that is both really good and active. Small enough to fit in 1 server.

As long as we have servers the issue will remain. Megaservers, along with events that provide positive outcomes through game theory can fix this.

Let's say a strong guild gets into EBG. Players pursing their own interests will try to leech other borderlands bringing the entire matchup to equilibrium even if EBG will clearly win.

I believe that we're most likely to have balanced matchups by letting players self regulate rather than with hard guardrails. This may solve both the population issue (incl. Off-Hours), as well as player quality.

Edited July 30 by Spadassin.4076