Relink algorithm?

[TheGrimm.5624]

3 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

(Just picking a random quotes to work from)

The purpose of the WR system is to make servers of close to similar size/activity (hours/players). And then lets the tiers sort out how well each Team works and move up and down until they hopefully find a tier they fit in. That is part of how WvW is designed/structured.

It is not meant to sort players by skill, organisation, PPT or PPK etc. It's meant to build up a team of equal "opportunity", and then leave it up to players skill and organisation to decide how well it goes.

This would work better with a 2 month Team duration though, to let teams move to the tier they fit into in first month, and then get more even matches in the second month. I assume ANet is planning to move back to 2 months after the initial period of testing/stats and when most players gets put on the right teams, and learn how to use the guild system.

----

What a lot of people here are talking about is essentially to change how WvW works on a very core level, in order to change it into something else. Some examples:

• Handicap system

Any system that tries to adjust score or combat in any way is called a handicap system. These systems are made to help whoever is in last place feel like they have a chance (like in Mario Kart when you have a higher chance to get better items like the shell that can shoot down the leading player).

The reason that WvW doesn't use any kind of handicap system (nope, Outnumbered EFFECT is not a handicap, it's a warning system), is that it tries to uphold some respect toward "fair competition". It might be misplaced, considering how many other things in the game mode works against "fair competition". But if you start adding handicap systems to the game, then whatever little respect people still have for "fair competition" goes out of the window.

Not saying it wouldn't be possible or even a good thing. Just that if ANet adds a handicap system, they might as well throw the WvW mode as it is under the bus and remake it as something else entirely, without any competition.

----

• PVP Matchmaking

A lot of the talk in this topic is about matching Teams up against Teams. This is inherently not how WvW works, nor how Team-shuffling works (not even back in relinks, it randomized based on glicko scores, and then returned to 1up1down). What you're suggesting is basically PvP MatchMaking. That it sorts players (teams) after their PVP ranks, and set them up against similar ranked players.

In WvW terms this is what Tiers are. And moving up and down in Tiers is the Team adjusting its rank according to wins and losses. But this will reset each time we have a Team-Shuffle, obviously. And considering how the whole Team system works it has to be that way, ANet can't really predict how strong a new Team will be or not, as they can't predict how the combination of guilds and players and how well they'll organise or their separate skill levels.

Now again there could be ways to work around this, but the short version is again that it would have to throw the WvW design under the bus, and create something else, especially without the 24/7 format.

----

 

Well put.

The reasons we have 4 week links is that they are trying to gather info on the sorting logic. That is outside of the initial placement logic that has never worked since linking servers started. These are not the same issue to those that might be mixing the topics. 

[TheGrimm.5624]

16 minutes ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

For those who have participated in this '' teams / server '' game mode putting their hinge, as you should expect right in the '' team / server '' we are already well beyond this point. Comparison and competition have not only passed under the bus, but you have taken the bus and thrown it off the bridge, so as not to leave any trace.

😞 My friend, as I said, take it with a grain of salt, and use it as a time to go on vacation and wander around meeting new people. I miss the faces I don't see any longer, but I try and see new ones and make them smile where I can. May you always find good hunting!

[Mabi black.1824]

13 minutes ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

😞 My friend, as I said, take it with a grain of salt, and use it as a time to go on vacation and wander around meeting new people. I miss the faces I don't see any longer, but I try and see new ones and make them smile where I can. May you always find good hunting!

Dear TheGrimm, don't pay too much attention to what I write, I'm a strange player, I used to play in reference to my server, you know in a server-based game, I had found there my reason for participation / purpose etc etc. yes the hunt is fun, but without a more itinerant '' reason '' behind it lasts for a short time. I'm definitely outdated. and I tell you that it is better that I move away from this forum as well, because I really can't be constructive. so to say that it makes little sense to participate in discussions and / or expectations etc etc. I will leave my axes to you as an inheritance. Know that they have slaughtered a significant number of enemies. They are quite ruined and bloody, but they still work well. I hope they can help you and that your hunt may never end.😉

[TheGrimm.5624]

12 minutes ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

Dear TheGrimm, don't pay too much attention to what I write, I'm a strange player, I used to play in reference to my server, you know in a server-based game, I had found there my reason for participation / purpose etc etc. yes the hunt is fun, but without a more itinerant '' reason '' behind it lasts for a short time. I'm definitely outdated. and I tell you that it is better that I move away from this forum as well, because I really can't be constructive. so to say that it makes little sense to participate in discussions and / or expectations etc etc. I will leave my axes to you as an inheritance. Know that they have slaughtered a significant number of enemies. They are quite ruined and bloody, but they still work well. I hope they can help you and that your hunt may never end.😉

I understand, same. I fought for home. Now I fight more for vendetta since home is lost. Your voice is always welcome here my friend. 

[godfat.2604]

6 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

The purpose of the WR system is to make servers of close to similar size/activity (hours/players). And then lets the tiers sort out how well each Team works and move up and down until they hopefully find a tier they fit in. That is part of how WvW is designed/structured.

It is not meant to sort players by skill, organisation, PPT or PPK etc. It's meant to build up a team of equal "opportunity", and then leave it up to players skill and organisation to decide how well it goes.

Thanks. We probably need to talk more about this because I think there are still too many people conflating population with match making.

I'll add one more example. Consider there are 10 players in total, and 2 are very skilled and they can fight equally against the rest of 8. What if we create 2 teams with those 2 vs 8? Because clearly those 2 players will be in the same guild as a duo right? We'll also have a equal fight as stated.

However WvW is a 24/7 mode. Let's assume everyone can just play 2 hours, and those 8 won't play together all the time because of course it's more difficult to get more players to play at the same time. What would happen? When those 2 play, they dominate the other side because not all of the 8 can play. When those 2 don't play, the other side will play against a dead team, which they just need 1 player to win. So which team will win in a week long match?

To be clear, I think WvW is a 24/7 game mode, so strengths should not be the way to balance the teams. Teams should be balanced around the population, which will make the team strengths less volatile to be based on a few skilled players, and we balance the matches with match making with tiers. If people want to balance everything around strengths, eventually it'll become more like PvP so it's only open within 2 hours prime time. That's not WvW anymore. You're welcome to create a new mode called GvG, totally good with that, just don't kill WvW.

[Chief.7143]

It is like sPVP and is completely random. That or they dont have any idea what metrics matter.

[Reztek.7805]

2 hours ago, godfat.2604 said:

To be clear, I think WvW is a 24/7 game mode, so strengths should not be the way to balance the teams. Teams should be balanced around the population, which will make the team strengths less volatile to be based on a few skilled players, and we balance the matches with match making with tiers. If people want to balance everything around strengths, eventually it'll become more like PvP so it's only open within 2 hours prime time. That's not WvW anymore. You're welcome to create a new mode called GvG, totally good with that, just don't kill WvW.

Until now, population size has largely equated to strength. It has been that way before linkings, before WR and also after WR. The overstacked teams always ended up on top. And i don't see why that would change. In a 24/7 mode with lots of players individual skill is ... secondary and in the end it only makes a small difference.

[Cuks.8241]

Maybe 1 up / 1 down is not the best implementation at least for first week.

Perhaps first week would be "placement" round. After the placement week you put the strongest 3 winners in t1. T2 would be the rest 2 of the winners and top second place (for EU 5 tiers) and so on. 

And after that you do 3 weeks of 1 up and 1 down.

It may even spark some competition with players.

[joneirikb.7506]

1 hour ago, Reztek.7805 said:

Until now, population size has largely equated to strength. It has been that way before linkings, before WR and also after WR. The overstacked teams always ended up on top. And i don't see why that would change. In a 24/7 mode with lots of players individual skill is ... secondary and in the end it only makes a small difference.

The actual strength of a Team is:
* Population
* Coverage
* Organisation

But most tend to lump Coverage and Organisation into the same pile as Population. So basically "Population = Strength" is a simplification, but it generally works well enough to explain things in most situations. But it becomes misleading when we're talking about the details.

And nowadays people also tend to define "Winning" differently, it used to be to be able to win Week matches, in which case you could win easily with just Coverage+Organisation even if outnumbered on the whole. But more and more I see people refer to "Winning" as just who can zerg harder with commanders in prime time, in which case Population+Organisation becomes the most important.

But yeah, it's becoming ever more difficult to figure out what people wants/talks about.

But largely I find that Organisation has become more important in general, since with WR the low-level organisation of servers has gone, so high-level organisation from guilds has become more important. Basically if you don't have a guild organising things to some degree, the amount of population matters less as they're more likely to flounder about without some kind of organisation to play around.

And with the scoring changes (time zone modifiers), I'd argue that Coverage has gone down in value as well, how much we'll have to watch and see.

[Mistwraithe.3106]

OK, so maybe Anet's main goal with WR is to balance populations as much as possible across both peak and off peak.

That's a good starting point but I think it's obviously better if Anet also manage to balance the teams so that matches are as even as possible.

That probably means taking into account organisation (ie a guild of 500 players who always have 50 players online in organised zergs is likely stronger than a guild of 500 players who also have 50 players online all the time but without any organised zergs) and probably even player experience and skill at WvW (a guild of WvW focused players who have been playing WvW for 5 years 20+ hours a week each are likely to be stronger than a similar sized guild of players who spend 2/3rds their time doing PvE and do WvW on the side). I would expect Anet have all the stats they need, even down to average WvW K v D counts per week for every player, so it should be possible to take these things into account. Matchups still won't be perfect because there are too few big mega guilds to be able to balance perfectly (ie ideally every team would have 2-3 mega guilds but there aren't enough to go around) but it could be a lot closer than it currently is.

[Arya Whitefire.8423]

Any plan for WR that didn't think it could result in N worlds, any one of which would have at least some chance of being the best world, was not a plan worth trying.

So either the plan was bad, or the outcome is bad.  Either way, it's bad 😛

 

[godfat.2604]

9 hours ago, Reztek.7805 said:

In a 24/7 mode with lots of players individual skill is ... secondary and in the end it only makes a small difference.

I am not talking about individual player skills. I reread what I said, I guess it's "a few skilled players" which was misleading. It's in the context of my example of 10 players. In the actual scenario, it's talking about a few organized guilds, not really individuals.

@joneirikb.7506 mentioned the rest of what I wanted to say, so I'll save some time and please just refer to that. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Gazrul.3086]

18 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

This would work better with a 2 month Team duration though

Please no, our first team this beta was so bad we didn't win a single match. I don't want to be stuck with a crap team for two months, I'd just not play WvW at all. 

[Dawdler.8521]

13 minutes ago, Gazrul.3086 said:

Please no, our first team this beta was so bad we didn't win a single match. I don't want to be stuck with a crap team for two months, I'd just not play WvW at all. 

People will argue this ad infinitum but to me it’s quite simple - if we want a dynamic and flexible mode then long “seasons” won’t do. 

As you say, we don’t want players to feel “stuck” in a hole they can’t get out of. This happened constantly with links, but since the player population was so heavily skewed toward stacked worlds they were always fine watching the rest of the worlds burn.

[godfat.2604]

6 hours ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

OK, so maybe Anet's main goal with WR is to balance populations as much as possible across both peak and off peak.

That's a good starting point but I think it's obviously better if Anet also manage to balance the teams so that matches are as even as possible.

I guess we have no ideas unless Anet are sharing their algorithm. If we can get population equally first, certainly we can then try to make the strengths about the same, too, as long as we're not sacrificing population for that.

However, I do not have confidence that Anet can properly determine strengths at all, which is going to be inaccurate anyway. Let's also think about this, if they can, why do we need to run the same teams for a month? Why do we even need to have tiers? We can just restructure for each matches, since they're going to be equal anyway. This is not happening, and we have enough of evidences.

6 hours ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

I would expect Anet have all the stats they need, even down to average WvW K v D counts per week for every player, so it should be possible to take these things into account.

I do not think they have all the stats, nor do I have confidence that they can properly assess the team strengths at all, based on my WvW experience for the decade, and industry experience even though not in games. Collecting data is a very hard problem. First they need to know what they want to look at, that is they need to know the game very well (which we doubt right?), and secondly the tech might not be there to collect the required data if it's not designed to do that in the very beginning. Lastly, new ways to collect the data often do not have historical data. Years of data can be too much and not accurate, etc, etc.

6 hours ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

Matchups still won't be perfect because there are too few big mega guilds to be able to balance perfectly (ie ideally every team would have 2-3 mega guilds but there aren't enough to go around) but it could be a lot closer than it currently is.

Right, and there are too many factors which can affect strengths. Think about it, if the commander in an organized guild cannot play today, or for the week, can the organized guild maintain even with their 80% of strength? Or will it drop to 0? It's very volatile to rely on a few players.

[godfat.2604]

34 minutes ago, Gazrul.3086 said:

Please no, our first team this beta was so bad we didn't win a single match. I don't want to be stuck with a crap team for two months, I'd just not play WvW at all.

I once proposed this and I'll propose again. Anet should have a health indicator for each team. If health is bad for a team, restructure it. If all teams are healthy, keep them as long as possible. Allow team transfer for individuals, and how it's limited can be discussed.

Thinking more about it now, I guess Anet won't do it, because this requires Anet looking at it and intervene when needed. I don't think they want it, because it's clear they only want to put WvW into auto-pilot mode so that they can move their WvW team to somewhere else.

[Dawdler.8521]

45 minutes ago, godfat.2604 said:

I once proposed this and I'll propose again. Anet should have a health indicator for each team. If health is bad for a team, restructure it. If all teams are healthy, keep them as long as possible. Allow team transfer for individuals, and how it's limited can be discussed.

How would this work if say 7 out of 9 teams are “healthy” and 2 are in a “horrible” state? 

You can’t remove a tier without kitten over a “healthy” team. You can’t “restructure” the two teams with each other, you’d still have two teams in shambles. By your own design you can’t just randomly take players from all other “healthy” teams and force them into the “horrible” teams. Players moving to horrible teams by themselves for the good of the game? Hahahahaha… yeah right.

Edited August 7 by Dawdler.8521

[godfat.2604]

3 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

How would this work if say 7 out of 9 teams are “healthy” and 2 are in a “horrible” state? 

You can’t remove a tier without kitten over a “healthy” team. You can’t “restructure” the two teams with each other, you’d still have two teams in shambles. By your own design you can’t just randomly take players from all other “healthy” teams and force them into the “horrible” teams.

It's a good question and I don't know. One idea is that once we want to restructure, we at least restructure half of the teams. So in the example, we restructure the least healthy 4 or 5 teams. It could be possible that, say, the overall activities reduced to 80%, and if we only restructure half of the teams, the originally healthy ones will become too stacked. If this is the case, we'll have no choice but to restructure all the teams.

This is clearly not something can be done automatically easily. It'll require a few iterations to understand the best restructuring criteria and how to proceed, and how to communicate to the players before restructuring so that players can have time to plan around. I assume this should be communicated at least 1 month in advanced.

This is a lot of manual efforts in the beginning of course. The advantages over automated restructuring every season (a month at the moment) is giving us a chance to prolong the communities built around the new teams, and also giving match making time to work.

[One more for the road.8950]

The problem is that people are confusing several parameters and issues. Nobody said the algorithm would equally distribute skilled/good players. When people say "the algorithm is kitten, there's no balance" they are talking about who won which skirmish in PPT , PPK and K/D. When people are talking about "empty teams" that clearly has activity and even goes up in tiers, they are talking about not having the content they wanted at the time they wanted, or losing fights due to unequal skill or organization between players or from a tag when they are around.

You can look at it what way you want, and I will state again that I like to play all sorts of WvW and levels of it, but a few good players knowing what they do will completely wreck through people that has no clue or barely looked at what they could do to better themselves as players. There is a lot of Dunning-Kruger effect out there when it comes to "knowing WvW", sometimes from people that has been playing it for years and years. And, actually, that is JUST FINE, people should play like they want on whatever amount of time they have available or want to play. Just like there are PvE raid ppl and groups that blaze through the raids while watching movies but others have to try several times with full focus to succeed.

The problem is/starts when they don't understand and then start confusing completely unrelated things: Blaming and complaining about things that make no sense neither from a technical nor game design point of view.  Just looking at all the random statements and "explanations" about what was going on taken out of thin air during betas from guilds, commanders and well known players is a study in human tendencies to not check facts but rather believe what someone they know said instead. Like all the "hackers" that are clearly not, it's just that people don't know what the different professions can do, or don't know how to read tells (even if there are those that hacks too). And we all started out as new, so nobody has to pretend they were never clueless or have at some point believed or stated wrong things about WvW and how it works.

That said, yes, it seems like which tiers you end up in the first MU after reshuffling are made by throwing darts on a wall. But where you should have had an inkling of where a server would belong in the tiers, I don't see how you would know with these teams. Faceless guilds in an algorithm doesn't say anything about if they know each other from before or have long time drama, if they are a guild that happily runs opens or only does closed, etc. When it comes to the more known/better organized alliance guilds there should be some kind of failsafe to make sure that you don't get two huge "only does fights during prime time" guild/alliance guild ending up on the same team but rather is distributed before the others on some sort of other parameters than what they are running now, or giving other parameters more weight. But we are already seeing (surprise surprise) some larger alliance guilds cracking, just like during the shorter betas, so that could also backfire.

Maybe it's time to get the longer time together back before reshuffle, the reason it was shortened had to do with server links. So that people get to know each other better, since some clearly didn't during hosts and links. I really don't see the difference in meeting new ppl on your side during a host+link or meeting new ppl on a WR team, but here we are. People are on a team for four weeks claiming it has no activity when they win skirmishes either by PPT or PPK, perhaps some more time together will let both people understand their team better and the tiers settle a bit.

And if ppl could understand that three out of three teams in a MU can't win we would come a long way. Two has to lose. Like it or not. And rather than only seeing it as "losing"... since everyone keeps throwing sports references around about this on the forums... maybe see it as shifting your team into the division that suits better and have more equal opposition. That is not a judgement on neither the individual players nor the guilds on the team, it's an objective measure of how the team as a whole, everything included, is put together.

And as a final note: People don't run to forums to tell how things are just fine, they run to the forums if they have a problem. So, y'know, keep that in mind when reading things here. When it comes to WR by itself WITHOUT confusing matters, what I am experiencing, playing and talking about in game mostly doesn't line up with most of the doom and gloom in the forums. 

[Mabi black.1824]

1 hour ago, One more for the road.8950 said:

People are on a team for four weeks claiming it has no activity when they win skirmishes either by PPT or PPK, perhaps some more time together will let both people understand their team better and the tiers settle a bit.

It is good to clarify that I am speaking for what are my experiences and my observations. But it's not about getting ''dead teams'' the problem is that every small group, every alliance, every umbrella guild, every guild, looks only at the small green meadow it owns. There's no common sense of 'team' if you come to capture my Garri, you'll completely slip off me, because I don't perceive it as ''mine''. Server-based game design is broken. the moment you broke the concept of belonging to a server. It was a sort of glue that held everything together, and gave meaning to the shared action of attack or defense, which we simply no longer have. Moving everything to the guild is fine in itself, but the consequence is that you have to adjust the game design to the guild. or you'll stay forever in a halfway mud.

That kind of player like me, it's not that he did anything strange in participating or feeling part of his server, thus passing through the concept of purpose/motivation. That's exactly what this mode, this game design intended. Now we are changing it, very well, but let's make sure that we change it for real, and above all in an intelligent way. If you believe that to participate in a team game you need to ask permission from someone, rather than pleasing someone rather than shaping your own style of play or you are out, it is the smart way to incept people, without exception. I fear that we will encounter a number of difficulties along the way.

Edited August 8 by Mabi black.1824

[Reztek.7805]

On 8/7/2024 at 12:51 AM, joneirikb.7506 said:

And nowadays people also tend to define "Winning" differently, it used to be to be able to win Week matches, in which case you could win easily with just Coverage+Organisation even if outnumbered on the whole.

Well, population helps a lot with coverage. But how do you have a coverage advantage when you are outnumbered on the whole? Or means on the whole just during a few skirmishes? Because otherwise weekly matches are usually won by population+coverage. And it came as no surprise, that those servers lost their linking partner soon after.

 

On 8/7/2024 at 12:51 AM, joneirikb.7506 said:

But more and more I see people refer to "Winning" as just who can zerg harder with commanders in prime time, in which case Population+Organisation becomes the most important.

I'd say this is also the time when organisation has the biggest effect at all. You usually can't keep it up for several hours.

 

On 8/7/2024 at 12:51 AM, joneirikb.7506 said:

But largely I find that Organisation has become more important in general, since with WR the low-level organisation of servers has gone, so high-level organisation from guilds has become more important. Basically if you don't have a guild organising things to some degree, the amount of population matters less as they're more likely to flounder about without some kind of organisation to play around.

I doubt that this will have a big effect, since there were always players without any organisation. And for farming zerglings on their way back to their guildblob you usually don't need much organisation.

And in general you'll probably find for every good player/guild at least a bad player/guild in your team ... which makes us all average. 😉

[Tula.6021]

On 8/5/2024 at 1:45 PM, Dawdler.8521 said:

Random is the only way that is fair.

Apparetnly you have a different definition of what is fair.

On 8/5/2024 at 1:45 PM, Dawdler.8521 said:

Not to mention if you define a team like “oh yeah this is totally going to be T1 top dog so let’s place them in T1!” then you by the same definition have to specify the T5 bottom for the shuffle.

Exactly how I want it.

Learn from past resets and use that info for shuffeling alliances.

By the time the top dog alliance climbed from low tier to high tier to may be find an opponent that puts up a resistance, the round is over and wvw gets reset. They won't even get to enjoy t1.

Is that fair to those alliances looking for content?

[Dawdler.8521]

55 minutes ago, Tula.6021 said:

Is that fair to those alliances looking for content?

Are you implying that people form dedicated community guilds for WvW with the express purpose of not looking for any WvW content?

Oh right. Maybe that explains the recruitments I constantly see in chat. 

"Looking for new WvW players! Raiding is mandatory 3 times a week or guildkick. All wings FC 10+ KP required"

[joneirikb.7506]

On 8/8/2024 at 9:36 PM, Reztek.7805 said:

Well, population helps a lot with coverage. But how do you have a coverage advantage when you are outnumbered on the whole? Or means on the whole just during a few skirmishes? Because otherwise weekly matches are usually won by population+coverage. And it came as no surprise, that those servers lost their linking partner soon after.

 

I'd say this is also the time when organisation has the biggest effect at all. You usually can't keep it up for several hours.

 

I doubt that this will have a big effect, since there were always players without any organisation. And for farming zerglings on their way back to their guildblob you usually don't need much organisation.

And in general you'll probably find for every good player/guild at least a bad player/guild in your team ... which makes us all average. 😉

(1) Coverage means that you can win with much less people as long as they're active at the right times. Traditionally you could win a match with for example 1/10 of the population of the enemy server, as long as your players played in the off hours, you didn't need anyone to show up in prime time at all. Several servers used to have reputation for that, guess SOS was the most famous one. But I also remember this affecting old bronze-tier server like Kaineng back then, used to have poor prime time population, but a decent few late night players which meant they could beat teams that had much higher population total.

So more population does increase the chance of also having more players that plays in off-hours, but that's not a guarantee for it. And we've seen that servers that are strong in one time-zone attracts other people of that time-zone, for various reasons. So I fully expect we'll see that more and more of the off-time players are going to group up into bigger and bigger guilds for WR as the playerbase gets more used to it.

(2+3) Yeah, organisation also have a big impact on morale. If we look back to the earliest years of WvW this was the main role of fight/zerg-busting guilds, come in and wreck something that was giving everyone else trouble to restore morale. But you don't need that for everything all the time. Well, normally, but we do have players in WvW that just refuse to move if they don't have a commander to follow. But basically having someone organise something on the map changes how most players see that map, even if they roam or scout they'll know something is going on somewhere else and will often change up their play to that. But for the most part, players just see a map without any organisation and just gives it up as hopeless and not worth trying.

Old servers you had the low-level organisation of people having played together and knew roughly what other peoples did and wanted, so often players knew that "If I do X, then Y will usually do Z, and we might get something rolling." This was in addition to guilds and commanders, which always did the more high-level organisation.

Eh, this was rushed, got to run, so don't have time to rant more.

[Spiral.3724]

Anet should just show us the data.