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

[Cyninja.2954]

21 minutes ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

This is for sure. But is that what it took to make this game fresh and more addictive? Are you sure? And what is the intention here? Do we do automatic and self-adjusting WVW lock the door and throw away the key?  Wouldn't you have preferred to see new maps and settings in rotation? Wouldn't you have preferred to see a team game with teams that can really compete with each other? Facing seasons and scheduled competitive events? Was what we were all really looking for an automatic mechanic that loses the very concept of a team in a team game along the way?

You are asking hypotheticalls without offering any solutions, answers or paths.

Fact: the new system solved an issue of longevity.

How well the other issues are solved time will tell. Do they need solving? Ideally yes and hopefully at the end of all the rework the mode will not only be setup to be future proof population wise but also offer improved content. 

Edited August 2 by Cyninja.2954

[Mabi black.1824]

44 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

You are asking hypotheticalls without offering any solutions, answers or paths.

true but it is wiser for me to take just one step back at this point. I close my eyes, cover my ears and cross my fingers.😉

P.S. If you click on my icon and go to the last page 66 at the bottom of the page, you will see my first article published in this section of the forum in 24/09/2021, and perhaps it helps to better understand everything I wrote in the years to follow. And how WVW was engaging for some of us. It makes me smile so much to read it now.

Edited August 2 by Mabi black.1824

[Reztek.7805]

6 hours ago, Dayra.7405 said:

Now it's friday, last weekend the opener complained about the imbalance of EU-T1. That's really funny it's turned out from scoring and won/lost matches that EU-T1 is currently the most balanced match in whole EU. https://www.gw2matchup.com/home?region=eu

T1-Leader has 322 points in all other EU matches the leader has more than that (325-379). T1-last has most points of all last in EU 292 vs 252-290.

Generally I would rate EU quite balanced this week, except T4.

Looks like try cry of imbalance wasn't justified by results. Not only draws are balanced 🙂 

To be fair he talked about prime time and the site shows pretty much that red is outnumbered during EU prime. And anyone who actually plays in that matchup can see that every evening. It's green vs blue,  red stands no chance of defending anything. Yesterday people even started to ask if there's a red team in this matchup. 😄 This is during EU prime though.

On a sidenote, i wouldn't call EU T2 very balanced either. Especially not for "Ettin's Back" (red).

[Spadassin.4076]

19 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

You are asking hypotheticalls without offering any solutions, answers or paths.

Fact: the new system solved an issue of longevity.

How well the other issues are solved time will tell. Do they need solving? Ideally yes and hopefully at the end of all the rework the mode will not only be setup to be future proof population wise jut also offer improved content. 

No it didn't because it doesn't take off-hours into account. The system I am proposing would.

[Dawdler.8521]

3 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

I don't know if these numbers are many or few. but since you are mentioning this site, I tell you how I observed it just last night. For the server I'm playing on, Skrittsburgh I saw from page 1 to page 14 (where on the last page there are players who killed 1 enemy, so they will have played like 10 minutes maybe) are the active users. From page 15 to page 52 I noticed all the players we lost along the way.

That's 10 players per page. So we have 140 active players and 380 players lost, or they had some commitment this week that prevented them from playing or they left the game. in itself this should suggest something to us anyway. And propose a change that excludes a portion of players in a conscious way (as Anet itself has stated), perhaps, but perhaps and still perhaps it was more appropriate to make a different WVW update to this one.

but close your eyes and cover your ears again and again. My words will fall on deaf ears as always. for 3 years now.

Well none of us knows the population numbers, but we can at least compare a few things. 

Total K+D has gone up  ~8% the last week with the split between +K and +D being pretty much equal (ignoring the time left but it's not gonna add that much).

So people seem to still be doing stuff.

[Reztek.7805]

3 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

Sure new problems, but here is the 1 kicker:

The mode is now future proofed population wise. The active WvW population could drop by half and you would not notice a difference. The system would simply adjust the amount of shards created during the next restructure.

That's something the old system could not do.

Ideally some of the issues get resolved but even if not, from a pure population design standpoint, WR has made sure this mode can live on until the game gets shut down.

Not sure if that would have been an issue with the old system. When linkings started EU had like 27 Worlds. 10 of them did not get a link, 14 were linked with another world to get 7 teams and the remaining 3 worlds formed the last team. So it seems like they could have linked as many worlds as they wanted into 1 team (unless they stated otherwise somewhere).

Would have been fun with 6 Servers in 1 Team! 😄

 

[Reztek.7805]

1 hour ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Total K+D has gone up  ~8% the last week with the split between +K and +D being pretty much equal (ignoring the time left but it's not gonna add that much).

So people seem to still be doing stuff.

Someone could also say: They removed ~17% of the teams to get ~9% more activity.

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, Reztek.7805 said:

Someone could also say: They removed ~17% of the teams to get ~9% more activity.

Someone could say that yes.

Others would say that's exactly what this forum demanded of Anet when they saw the pointless extra tiers.

[Cyninja.2954]

2 hours ago, Reztek.7805 said:

Someone could also say: They removed ~17% of the teams to get ~9% more activity.

The size of team reduction is actually irrelevant in this scenario numerically because empty teams do not produce activity

Example: If there had been 4 more empty tiers (aka 12 servers/shards more), the gain would have been 9% at the expense of 50% of teams. Sounds bad right? No, because in the end activity is what matters here and those empty tiers 7-10 had no bearing on it.

That's one integral part of the WR system: increase/maintain activity by managing amount of shards. THAT is literally what WR is for.

The issue right now is to get the system in shape to design teams which produce "fun" activity (which ranges from all the way of equal distribution of player types, over spreading out commanders, over covering time zones better). That's where the system needs touching up, as well as players given more/better tools to iteract with it.

Edited August 2 by Cyninja.2954

[XenesisII.1540]

At this point people need to start asking questions about the game mode.

Why do we need points?

It's suppose to be a driving force to win for your world, yet there is no actual reward for winning as a world, the only reason you go up in ranks is because you had more players on. Very little care about how much points you get from a capture, from a kill, or per tick, most people are interested in rewards. Being "number one" isn't even a thing worth driving for, it's been 12 years, servers like Blackgate already hold the record for most wins in T1, no one cares now. Not to mention the worlds aren't even unified anymore, it's just random people tossed in with the biggest alliances once a month. Who cares if we could have won with Mithric Cliffs, cause the next month it got erased from the roster of worlds.

 

Why manipulate points per time zone?

We want even matches, we want even fights, yet that isn't easily accomplished with an open fixed map mode. All worlds have to have all 4 maps queued at the same time in order for population balance to happen, this is the high ceiling for balance of populations which doesn't happen very often in a match, in fact it mostly only happens 1-2 hours after reset into a new matchup. So they want to flatten points per time zone to blanket coverage points, until it's prime and give them the bonus points there, but they don't even do it per match/world, just a region blanket. It's not exactly fair to everyone involved, neither was the first system, but that got somewhat fixed with skirmish mode.

 

What is the points and ranking system suppose to lead to?

Just as a balancer of worlds that anet randomly shuffles around once a month now anyways? Yeah your world got the short straw on the alliance stack, now wait 3 weeks while you drop to T4 for a proper match, oh wait everything resets next week. Oh no wait you got the pog stack on the biggest alliance in the game, but you gotta wait a few weeks before you can meet a server like you, oh wait everything resets next week. We going to bring back tournaments? the thing they said led to a massive burnout of players? the thing someone else said led to the breaking down of servers? Do we really want tournaments as the end game purpose of points and ranks and seasons?

 

So if points and rank are pretty meaningless, as well as fixed server/world communities, tournaments make people quit.... why do we even need WR? or Worlds? or fixed populated maps? or manipulated points? To continue giving us the illusion of balance? or fake purpose for playing wvw other than rewards? We're at a point in the game where rewards are the only thing that matters.

They should have just made an improved instanced eotm mode, or instanced battlegrounds, and let everyone pick one of the three colors, instead of dumping everyone into the washing machine once a month. There's always going to be coverage problems until they figure out a way to allow players outside of that world to fill up a map. What they may need to do is maybe look into something like the old guesting service when the game started, and let players be on a "4th faction" not tied to any of the worlds if they want, one that only allows players to jump into a lowest population world/map to help them out for a period of time, let's say every two hours on a skirmish flip over. And again not playing for points, just playing for more even populations during a skirmish and rewards. Points really should just be scrapped for objective bonuses instead.

🤷‍♂️🍦

Edited August 2 by XenesisII.1540

[Leaa.2943]

You have EotM for that and noone likes or play EotM except for the GvG corner. It was never interesting for WvW players  and it would move us even further away from servers and feeling a part of something. It is not a problem solver it will kill off WvW as it did with EotM. 

[Spadassin.4076]

32 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

At this point people need to start asking questions about the game mode.

Why do we need points?

It's suppose to be a driving force to win for your world, yet there is no actual reward for winning as a world, the only reason you go up in ranks is because you had more players on. Very little care about how much points you get from a capture, from a kill, or per tick, most people are interested in rewards. Being "number one" isn't even a thing worth driving for, it's been 12 years, servers like Blackgate already hold the record for most wins in T1, no one cares now. Not to mention the worlds aren't even unified anymore, it's just random people tossed in with the biggest alliances once a month. Who cares if we could have won with Mithric Cliffs, cause the next month it got erased from the roster of worlds.

 

Why manipulate points per time zone?

We want even matches, we want even fights, yet that isn't easily accomplished with an open fixed map mode. All worlds have to have all 4 maps queued at the same time in order for population balance to happen, this is the high ceiling for balance of populations which doesn't happen very often in a match, in fact it mostly only happens 1-2 hours after reset into a new matchup. So they want to flatten points per time zone to blanket coverage points, until it's prime and give them the bonus points there, but they don't even do it per match/world, just a region blanket. It's not exactly fair to everyone involved, neither was the first system, but that got somewhat fixed with skirmish mode.

 

What is the points and ranking system suppose to lead to?

Just as a balancer of worlds that anet randomly shuffles around once a month now anyways? Yeah your world got the short straw on the alliance stick, now wait 3 weeks while you drop to T4 for a proper match, oh wait everything resets next week. Oh no wait you got the pog stick on the biggest alliance in the game, but you gotta wait a few weeks before you can meet a server like you, oh wait everything resets next week. We going to bring back tournaments? the thing they said led to a massive burnout of players? the thing someone else said led to the breaking down of servers? Do we really want tournaments as the end game purpose of points and ranks and seasons?

 

So if points and rank are pretty meaningless, as well as fixed server/world communities, tournaments make people quit.... why do we even need WR? or Worlds? or fixed populated maps? or manipulated points? To continue giving us the illusion of balance? or fake purpose for playing wvw other than rewards? We're at a point in the game where rewards are the only thing that matters.

They should have just made an improved instanced eotm mode, or instanced battlegrounds, and let everyone pick one of the three colors, instead of dumping everyone into the washing machine once a month. There's always going to be coverage problems until they figure out a way to allow players outside of that world to fill up a map. What they may need to do is maybe look into something like the old guesting service when the game started, and let players be on a "4th faction" not tied to any of the worlds if they want, one that only allows players to jump into a lowest population world/map to help them out for a period of time, let's say every two hours on a skirmish flip over. And again not playing for points, just playing for more even populations during a skirmish and rewards. Points really should just be scrapped for objective bonuses instead.

🤷‍♂️🍦

Exactly. Make PvE like instanced megaservers with events that give rewards. That's the only solution. Take the red pill everyone.

Edited August 2 by Spadassin.4076

[Spadassin.4076]

7 minutes ago, Leaa.2943 said:

You have EotM for that and noone likes or play EotM except for the GvG corner. It was never interesting for WvW players  and it would move us even further away from servers and feeling a part of something. It is not a problem solver it will kill off WvW as it did with EotM. 

You know that eotm is dead because there is no pip right? It was the fullest map prior to the pip addition. There were epic fights on bridges, where 50 people would fall off from a Necro fear.

Edited August 2 by Spadassin.4076

[Leaa.2943]

15 minutes ago, Spadassin.4076 said:

You know that eotm is dead because there is no pip right? It was the fullest map prior to the pip addition. There were epic fights on bridges, where 50 people would fall off from a Necro fear.

No it was dead or arrivel and there was no pips back then. It was so dead that PvE took it over and then after that pips was a thing. And your post have Disney goggles, yes there was some fear fights but the rest was not. After a few weeks EotM was empty. Except for the GvG spots those are obviously active. 

[Hesione.9412]

8 hours ago, Spadassin.4076 said:

Yes on one map, this cannot be solved. But not necessarily on the entire matchup as people will try to join the other maps to leech. If I see what seems like a winning matchup, I may try to join it. If enough unorganized players do this which they will. It will balance the matchup because other competing guilds will mostly join the empty maps to fit their own squad.

Game theory can achieve balance by letting people self regulate. Interventionism only leads to more problems because people are not fixed chess pieces and have their own interests. This is basic economics.

The problem with game theory, along with economics, is that it assumes perfect rationality. What we see in WvW is not.

[Hesione.9412]

8 hours ago, Spadassin.4076 said:

Yeah I don't know why people keep quoting this just to show that they're data driven while completely missing any form of basic judgment, and critical thinking.

Interesting comment as you're accusing anet of making WvW worse by interventionism in player numbers per side.

[kash.9213]

50 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

At this point people need to start asking questions about the game mode.

Why do we need points?

It's suppose to be a driving force to win for your world, yet there is no actual reward for winning as a world, the only reason you go up in ranks is because you had more players on. Very little care about how much points you get from a capture, from a kill, or per tick, most people are interested in rewards. Being "number one" isn't even a thing worth driving for, it's been 12 years, servers like Blackgate already hold the record for most wins in T1, no one cares now. Not to mention the worlds aren't even unified anymore, it's just random people tossed in with the biggest alliances once a month. Who cares if we could have won with Mithric Cliffs, cause the next month it got erased from the roster of worlds.

 

Why manipulate points per time zone?

We want even matches, we want even fights, yet that isn't easily accomplished with an open fixed map mode. All worlds have to have all 4 maps queued at the same time in order for population balance to happen, this is the high ceiling for balance of populations which doesn't happen very often in a match, in fact it mostly only happens 1-2 hours after reset into a new matchup. So they want to flatten points per time zone to blanket coverage points, until it's prime and give them the bonus points there, but they don't even do it per match/world, just a region blanket. It's not exactly fair to everyone involved, neither was the first system, but that got somewhat fixed with skirmish mode.

 

What is the points and ranking system suppose to lead to?

Just as a balancer of worlds that anet randomly shuffles around once a month now anyways? Yeah your world got the short straw on the alliance stick, now wait 3 weeks while you drop to T4 for a proper match, oh wait everything resets next week. Oh no wait you got the pog stick on the biggest alliance in the game, but you gotta wait a few weeks before you can meet a server like you, oh wait everything resets next week. We going to bring back tournaments? the thing they said led to a massive burnout of players? the thing someone else said led to the breaking down of servers? Do we really want tournaments as the end game purpose of points and ranks and seasons?

 

So if points and rank are pretty meaningless, as well as fixed server/world communities, tournaments make people quit.... why do we even need WR? or Worlds? or fixed populated maps? or manipulated points? To continue giving us the illusion of balance? or fake purpose for playing wvw other than rewards? We're at a point in the game where rewards are the only thing that matters.

They should have just made an improved instanced eotm mode, or instanced battlegrounds, and let everyone pick one of the three colors, instead of dumping everyone into the washing machine once a month. There's always going to be coverage problems until they figure out a way to allow players outside of that world to fill up a map. What they may need to do is maybe look into something like the old guesting service when the game started, and let players be on a "4th faction" not tied to any of the worlds if they want, one that only allows players to jump into a lowest population world/map to help them out for a period of time, let's say every two hours on a skirmish flip over. And again not playing for points, just playing for more even populations during a skirmish and rewards. Points really should just be scrapped for objective bonuses instead.

🤷‍♂️🍦

Maybe that 4th faction to fill up the lowest pop side can be filtered in by Rifts in the open world that open up on a bunch of maps when WvW registers a threshold of population imbalance. Then people in the open world maps can have a choice to interact with the Rift and join WvW for a skirmish or a certain amount of time at the least to earn some kind of small reward and maybe an Ally bonus to what they were doing in the pve map before they answered the call. 

[XenesisII.1540]

20 hours ago, Leaa.2943 said:

You have EotM for that and noone likes or play EotM except for the GvG corner. It was never interesting for WvW players  and it would move us even further away from servers and feeling a part of something. It is not a problem solver it will kill off WvW as it did with EotM. 

The suggestion isn't to just use the eotm map, it's for the population system on all the maps. The only reason eotm isn't used these days is because the rewards were nerfed, I bet you anything if they put in skirmish rewards in there it would be packed the next day, especially with those people who are having a hard time in outnumbered worlds, they can hop into eotm and have better hope of matching with more players from their colored side. It wasn't dead on arrival, it was alive and well for some time as a place to level alts and ktrain for rewards, many of the 10k ranks first came out of eotm, what made it dead at times was one side dominating and took over the entire map, people would then leave for a difference instance or back to wvw instead.

The question again is, what is the point of having all these changes to control population and points scoring, when there's no greater purpose for it all. We might as well be playing in a system that tries to filter players into maps to fill them up from the region, instead of hoping three separate worlds will have the players to fill the maps to match the other worlds, 8 betas and 2 WR rounds shows it's still not any better, just like the queue problem that never seems to get solved with numerous fixes.

Btw wvw is already rolling onto it's death bed, especially with these population and defense and scoring changes and boon ball bias balance, and we're beyond killing communities at this point with WR, it's no longer an excuse we can use against eotm type of populating instead.

All I'm saying is, we would have been better off with a proper system for populating maps like an instance battleground would have done, than this half bolted on WR system that took six years to make and barely makes any difference to population balance, while destroying what was left of server communities ravaged by half a decade of bandwagons, who then got rewarded by not having to spend gems on transfer anymore and have everyone miserably populated around them instead. 🤷‍♂️

Edited August 3 by XenesisII.1540

[Reztek.7805]

4 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Someone could say that yes.

Others would say that's exactly what this forum demanded of Anet when they saw the pointless extra tiers.

The 2 statements do not contradict each other. More people in the teams make it more likely that they actually meet each other and interact more often.

3 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

The size of team reduction is actually irrelevant in this scenario numerically because empty teams do not produce activity

Example: If there had been 4 more empty tiers (aka 12 servers/shards more), the gain would have been 9% at the expense of 50% of teams. Sounds bad right? No, because in the end activity is what matters here and those empty tiers 7-10 had no bearing on it.

That's one integral part of the WR system: increase/maintain activity by managing amount of shards. THAT is literally what WR is for.

The issue right now is to get the system in shape to design teams which produce "fun" activity (which ranges from all the way of equal distribution of player types, over spreading out commanders, over covering time zones better). That's where the system needs touching up, as well as players given more/better tools to iteract with it.

Except those tiers were not empty but all tiers had less players.

If you play for an hour and meet an enemy every 10 minutes OR if you play for an hour and meet an enemy every 5 minutes is a big difference in activity, but not in time played. And therefor the number of tiers is relevant when trying to compare activity.

 

[Cyninja.2954]

45 minutes ago, Reztek.7805 said:

Except those tiers were not empty but all tiers had less players.

No they didn't. I literally added 4 immagined tiers with 0 activity to show how the values in your comparison change, making it read more dramatic when in fact, the only value of interest is the activity one.

45 minutes ago, Reztek.7805 said:

If you play for an hour and meet an enemy every 10 minutes OR if you play for an hour and meet an enemy every 5 minutes is a big difference in activity, but not in time played. And therefor the number of tiers is relevant when trying to compare activity.

No, it's not.

Time played versus activity around that time played are literally the only values of interest here. If the activity goes up around the same time played: good. If it goes down: bad.

Number of tiers is of 0 consequence.

Change in number of tiers might be a factor as to why activity over time played changes, but as far as valuation, it's not relevant.

Edited August 3 by Cyninja.2954

[Chaba.5410]

7 hours ago, Reztek.7805 said:

Someone could also say: They removed ~17% of the teams to get ~9% more activity.

Removing teams is not removing population though.

[Chaba.5410]

3 hours ago, Spadassin.4076 said:

You know that eotm is dead because there is no pip right? It was the fullest map prior to the pip addition. There were epic fights on bridges, where 50 people would fall off from a Necro fear.

EOTM died when Anet nerfed the rewards so PvE players couldn't just use it as an alternate Queensdale champ train.  You used to be able to gain XP from it too.  It was a good place to level a character.

Edited August 3 by Chaba.5410

[Arya Whitefire.8423]

Back when EotM was nerfed, WvW was very much worth saving.   That is much less true now:

Add a new mode that works similary to EoTM, with the following changes:

1. The map will be EBG.

2. Change the match duration to somewhere between 4 and 8 hours.

3. Change the team assignment to be random, when you join instead of based on the WvW team color.  Trying to maintain even numbers on all teams.

4. Allow parties, and maybe squads of up to about 20 players to join as one, and get assigned to the same color.

5. Run reward tracks and pips at the same rate as WvW.

I think the above would very very quickly eclipse OG WvW in popularity.

 

[Spadassin.4076]

7 hours ago, Arya Whitefire.8423 said:

Back when EotM was nerfed, WvW was very much worth saving.   That is much less true now:

Add a new mode that works similary to EoTM, with the following changes:

1. The map will be EBG.

2. Change the match duration to somewhere between 4 and 8 hours.

3. Change the team assignment to be random, when you join instead of based on the WvW team color.  Trying to maintain even numbers on all teams.

4. Allow parties, and maybe squads of up to about 20 players to join as one, and get assigned to the same color.

5. Run reward tracks and pips at the same rate as WvW.

I think the above would very very quickly eclipse OG WvW in popularity.

 

I'd like to have all maps like that. But Anet wouldn't throw away the alliance system because of sunk cost fallacy. Perhaps we could start with one map as a pilot, and EBG is best.

Furthermore, it seems hard for new players to find a proper alliance with the current system. Such a map will give them chances to meet other players.

Edited August 3 by Spadassin.4076

[Anyula.7213]

Balance 😁