World Restructuring

[dzeRnumbrd.6129]

I like the idea BUT I think you are missing something from consideration in your player ranking & combining solution.

Time zones!

Alliances will most definitely game the timezones to ensure high coverage in dead spots.

Your algorithm should rank every non-allied guild & player as being OCX, SEA, NA or EU time zone (based on where they play the majority of their hours).

So if I play 5 hours in SEA every night (25 hours) and on the weekends I play 5 hours NA during reset (10 hours) then I'm tagged as a "SEA player".

Non-allied guilds should be judged as being NA/SEA/OCX/EU by the composition of their members (30 NA players, 10 SEA players, 2 OCX, 1 EU gets marked as an NA guild).

Once the "balance job" has this player TZ information, the "world balancing algorithm" should then be able to balance time zones.

If a world which contained a "BG alliance" that had stacked some OCX and EU guilds so they can paper every objective while no one else is playing then you could back fill the "Mag alliance" and "JQ alliance" with OCX and EU guilds/pugs instead of NA and SEA pugs.

This method would stop alliances gaming the time zones and help fill coverage gaps to make the game more fun for everyone involved.

[KlarissaMT.5412]

Thought I'd toss this out there again as it got some thumbs up but no real discussion:

I notice arena net is spending a lot of discussion time answering "good job we like it" posts. Is it ok to have misgivings about this and still get a response. There's been some fabulous posts asking about alliances "gaming the system" by stacking highly skilled players which would end up playing against a pool of new players, solos or have not guilds just looking to provide a WvW experience for their members. What exactly would all of this fix? What is the current problem and how in the new proposal could you guarantee it would not rear its ugly head again in a slightly different form?

[Toll Booth Willie.6723]

It'll take me some time to wrap my head around all this but it sounds like a decent idea.

[Drecien.4508]

I don't see this as a solution. This only creates the problem on a "season" basis. The structure as it has been is not perfect but it works. Those who play and enjoy WVW come together under a united banner of the server the represent. Many have loyalty to their server and have since the beginning. While the idea looks nice for you to be able to play with friends/guildmates the resulting mess will leave us back where we are.VOTE NO ON PROP 8 SERVER DESTRUCTION.

[Freezy.4952]

Wow, this would go a long way to making WvW even more exciting

Any chance there will be world based Voice chats functions added into the game? At least for commanders and luitenants / scouts.Managing all the different applications and discord channels/ts3 servers is going to be a hassle, plus the first week of each season will be a mess to be sure, with every guild running their own server, refusing to budge and move to another service/server is bound to occur.

Built in voice chat (possibly sponsored by a third-party voice chat service), could be all that you really need.Squads are a natural way, the only downside would be people outside of squad (but still listening to the commander). So a listen/communicate option would be great to have.

25 pages of feedback, I'm pretty sure someone else has mentioned it by now.

[Guest]

I'm actually pretty impressed with this. It's not going to satisfy the fever dreams of some of the more... "creatively theoretical" types on here who have posted overhaul ideas, nor the purists who won't approve any changes at all. But it's far more extensive that I expected, while still being in line with what ANet has always held up as its philosophy for the game. So, big kudos for that. As has been said umpteen times, change is sorely needed and this seems like a positive direction.

There's way, way to much to read through here but I will say a little something in regards to the "server identity" type comments a few people have posted: Let it go. Actually, just recognize that it's gone and has been for a long time, since megaserver really. It's never coming back. Let's look forward to something that can reinvigorate WvW in a different way. I say this as a person who's been on one of those servers (TC) since launch, is an avid WvW participant, and who really thoroughly enjoyed the glory days of how quirky and fun the Toast could be. We are not that server anymore. There's a handful of people still around who are lifers and know each other, but almost all the guilds are gone or diminished, and there are no server-wide events, server-wide rallies, or server-wide strategizing anymore. We're not the goofy RP server, or the friendly can-do server, or the never-give-up pug server, or the factious but dominant T1 server anymore. Those are relics of a different time in the game, and they were awesome, but outside of maybe BG and it's rep for "stack here to win," no server has an identity independent of its strongest guilds anymore. We're just another name on an undifferentiated list for new players to randomly pick and ANet to awkwardly attach together with other names to create matchups. This changes allows them to that same thing in a way that creates better gameplay and less "logging in to watch Server X's SEA blob ktrain all maps for 8 hours when we don't have any coverage."

In short, I'm ready, and I'm excited! Ready to drop all the baggage and bad blood lingering around the current servers, ready to play with friends new and old. Bring it on!

[Kamara.4187]

This is just the best gaming news ever. I humbly thank those who took up the endeavor to make this happen. /salute :)

[alcopaul.2156]

@Jiminy.8340 said:

@alcopaul.2156 said:pugmanding is officially dead

Only with the same PUGs. There is always be a whole new group every 8 weeks with the proposed system.

but it will be monopolized by guilds and alliances. and pugmanding is about familiarity and trust.

if they push through this, i hope that eotm will have the same rewards as wvw so pugmanding will still thrive, in EOTM.

[neven.3785]

@alcopaul.2156 said:

@Jiminy.8340 said:

@alcopaul.2156 said:pugmanding is officially dead

Only with the same PUGs. There is always be a whole new group every 8 weeks with the proposed system.

but it will be monopolized by guilds and alliances. and pugmanding is about familiarity and trust.

if they push through this, i hope that eotm will have the same rewards as wvw so pugmanding will still thrive, in EOTM.

EOTM should not have the same rewards. It is simply a waiting room, and this change should essentially eliminate the need for such a waiting room. Play in WvW proper with its greater risk of encountering enemies. Otherwise better spend your time on a PVE map

[Caliburn.1845]

Actually pugmanders are going to return with a vengeance if winning matters again. Guilds can only typically rally for a few hours, but pugmanders can rally for much longer.

Within the secret places where alliances are being forged pugmanders are already being recognized as being extremely valuable, and each current successful pugmander is going to be courted by different alliances.

Especially because a pugmander doesn't take up the alliance manpower slots that a guild will take. The most bang for the buck so to speak will be a popular pugmander.

[Spurnshadow.3678]

OK, I've read everything carefully.

Congratulations on finally taking the time to address some of the largest concerns going on with WvW and having the guts to do it in a bold way. That's what is needed. I'm suspecting that some of the credit for this goes to the new Mike.

While this idea is very old, it isn't a bad one. But after reading, you will still have one of the biggest issues, which is even acknowledged in the post. Balancing across time zones.

Even though world linking has brought world populations closer together, it is impossible for us to get populations and coverage any closer because the current worlds do not give us the granularity needed to do that. For example in NA, Blackgate has decent coverage across all time zones whereas worlds like Crystal Desert have higher peak times and lower off-hour times. Because world linking isn't granular enough, we don't have the ideal link that allows Crystal Desert to have coverage that is similar to Blackgate.

This is why, in the new World Restructuring system, we will remove all players from their current worlds, and make new worlds every eight weeks. This will create more granular pieces, which allow us to avoid situations like the Crystal Desert example.

There's nothing in the plan that addresses this. Instead of rehashing stuff, I'll just refer you to a previous post: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/21469/idea-to-help-population-balance#latestBasically, how this would translate to your plan, you need to have different timezones for world creation and transfers. Otherwise, NA timezone players will just stack together if there's no limit to that time zone. So lets say a total of 5000 (arbitrary number as you haven't given us a number to the limit to a world) players starts signing up for World A and they're all NA players. If your world cap was 5000, then that would would be full, and stacked all NA. That's bad. A better way would be to assign a time zone to players, NA, EU, Sea/OCX, and they can fill into a worlds time zone. If they are a new player and don't have a history, they can choose one. More info in the link, but that's a gist.

Alliances would totally need to be larger than 500. 1000 would probably be a better number. You should also have an alliance limit based on time zone, like 2, otherwise, you'll get un-even time zone play.

Some questions regarding alliances: How are they controlled? Who determines where an alliance plays during world creation. Is this ripe for abuse? How are you going to prevent bullying? You guys are gonna have to do multiple round table discussions on how the system can be gamed or abused.

How much time will we have at a reset to determine what world we want to play in? You said this will happen at reset, but do we spam something like we currently do? Do we get 5 minutes? An hour?

Can single players not in a guild be in an alliance?

Everything else sounds fine without having further details.

I'm still very concerned about the end of the post, mainly the history spin. This plan should have been in the works for years, not something that is beginning now and will take months, probably a year, to implement. Yes, we know you guys were working on a plan similar to this a couple years ago, and, as you say, the technology didn't exist. Well, duh. None of this technology exists. You guys have to make it. That's the hard work. That's why you're building a product to make money. World linking didn't exist either, but you made that. The difference is that world linking was easier and could be rolled out sooner. But it was supposed to be a temporary fix to a serious concern about population imbalance while something better was being worked on. That was abandoned.

I do hope you can roll this out sooner rather than later. I do hope it is implemented well. I do hope it brings lots players back. Hopefully WvW class balance can be figured out at the same time. Good luck.

[Pagan Highlander.5948]

I believe this is definitely the right decision. WvW has been dying for quite some time. At one time, NA had 24 Servers (Worlds) and most were very competitive. As time went on, Players started moving to other servers, and after 5 years, we have 12 servers and the number of WvW players has decreased by 60%+. In addition, as that Graph shows, of the remaining players, 80% are in the top 4 or 5 Servers and if Blackgate, jade Quarry or maguma were open, it would only be 3 servers. This is not competitive, its not fun, its a desire by all to be competitive, have fun, get fights, and have a great playing environment.We all want a competitive, challenging, fun WvW environment, no matter your playing style. Before we moan the death of Small guilds, or the destruction of Communities (Most have long been destroyed). Lets let them come out with the details. they gave us the general outline, now give them your ideas to finetune the system and give us the details. This should give all guilds a much wider base to recruit players (since they aren't restricted by server). it gives all players a much wider choice on playing style and which guilds they wish to be in.Last but not least, it allows Everyone to have a fresh and renewable WvW experience every 8 weeks (yes, I'd rather it be 4 weeks) and get rid of the same old matchups, thus bringing new and interesting challenges.

[warduke.1780]

RIP GW2. What an idiotic move. Rethink this or lose 90% of your playerbase.

[XenesisII.1540]

@Spurnshadow.3678 said:Basically, how this would translate to your plan, you need to have different timezones for world creation and transfers. Otherwise, NA timezone players will just stack together if there's no limit to that time zone. So lets say a total of 5000 (arbitrary number as you haven't given us a number to the limit to a world) players starts signing up for World A and they're all NA players. If your world cap was 5000, then that would would be full, and stacked all NA. That's bad. A better way would be to assign a time zone to players, NA, EU, Sea/OCX, and they can fill into a worlds time zone. If they are a new player and don't have a history, they can choose one. More info in the link, but that's a gist.

Players can stack alliances, but alliances will be randomly placed on the new worlds, you cannot sign up for a specific server, Anet will be assigning the servers not the players. Everyone is basically randomly assigned but it will be according to certain variables which they will track, they mentioned this including time of day.

World CreationThe system creates new worlds and assigns them a pre-generated name at the start of each season. We use 'season' to describe the time between World Restructuring. We plan on eight-week seasons, which is similar to the current time between links. We will discuss more about seasons later.World Creation builds teams so they have similar predicted participation, skill, coverage, and language. Team assignment moves players onto teams by calculating the contribution value of a player and using that calculation to distribute players fairly. We plan to track stats like play hours in WvW, commander time and squad size, time of day, and participation levels. The exact stats have yet to be determined and we are open to suggestions of other stats to use in this system. This new system will expand upon the current calculation that uses play hours for linking.

They are going to take a lot of things into account to assign players evenly across servers, including commanders.

Some questions regarding alliances: How are they controlled? Who determines where an alliance plays during world creation. Is this ripe for abuse? How are you going to prevent bullying? You guys are gonna have to do multiple round table discussions on how the system can be gamed or abused.

Most likely they will assign the biggest alliances on separate servers to start with. From that they can assign the smaller alliances and random guilds and players to fill in the gaps for coverage. Players will have no control where they are assigned, anet does all that.

[Jiminy.8340]

@warduke.1780 said:RIP GW2. What an idiotic move. Rethink this or lose 90% of your playerbase.

What is dead may never die.

[Dawdler.8521]

I havent read through every response as I just read on random but does anyone know if Anet has answered the question:

Will we actually see the alliances in game (PvE and WvW)? As in which alliance hold what objective and what player belong where? Not just what world you are in for 8 weeks.

Because that will go a looooooooong way of maintaining an identity in the world, ie pride over your alliance just like flaunting a guild tag.

This has been a major issue with the links too that Anet never bothered fixing.

[Klypto.1703]

Yeah a big issue I think a lot of players have is even the large fight guilds out there even if they have 50 players or more they still are not anywhere near the size of pve guilds building up their guilds nor the small havoc guilds which can be anywhere from 5-20 players. As well a lot of the content in guild halls is for pve that are most of what is being paid for when you upgrade guilds and the guild level requirement on a lot of the wvw based things makes it a burden on wvw guilds. So when guilds will be established as WvW guilds will they be able to build one up mostly on the basis of wvw and adapt these pve content areas like the guild portal for instance to be wvw based instead of for pve?

One of the problems large guilds have that affects smaller guilds is that in a lot of cases neither can move adequately to where they need to be/want to be. In relation to this topic it would be beneficial if a wvw portal was created to make this easier. Then I read somewhere not long ago about a proposed change of having watch towers not work on you if you have outnumbered buff which I think would be a welcomed change because currently there is no counter for that especially with towers that are badly setup for them where it can see you 500 billion miles away. Another aspect of guilds and their size is with guild missions like trying not to laugh yourself to death being a small wvw guild and you see capture a keep and get it to Tier 1. Sure no problem I'll just pull out my WvW vacuum cleaner and suck the 50+ player map blob defending it into this so I can get my guild mission done. Also a better selection of things to buy with the commendations for wvw too that would be nice.

Last thing though is for there to be a more hands on approach when dealing with the issues like the necros ever since HoT came out where you have players that play nothing but the most broken builds that kill players for them making it where there isn't any skill involved. So pretend like these players are getting free gems when they do this and disable it until you fix it and then it will feel better.

[Kamsin.8541]

But what is the max player cap per guild (WvW) ? It's the main issue here.One alliance of 2 guilds = 1 server or worth, only one guild = 1 server

[Evolute.6239]

@Kamsin.8541 said:But what is the max player cap per guild (WvW) ? It's the main issue here.One alliance of 2 guilds = 1 server or worth, only one guild = 1 server

I mean, yes, in theory

In reality is there a single guild that could have 500 active players who ALL toggle their WvW for the guild on? Highly unlikely.

[DoctorOverlord.8620]

This sounds very interesting idea and I would be willing to give it a try. It seems like it could be a good way to solve the ever-difficult balance issue.

It is nice that the sorting system will be trying to assigned friends to the same world. I am assuming it will do this by looking at our Friends lists? If so, I would like to suggest that players be allowed to give priority of WvW assignment to select people on their Friends list.

I have a long Friends list because I like to add people who I may have only met casually, and I don't usually remove anyone. But most of the people I currently interact with chose the Tarnished Coast/RP server at the start while I did not. So it would be helpful to be able to choose which players I would most like to be assigned together for WvW. If there were a checkbox or something that could be ticked by those preferred people in our Friends list, then the sorting system can give them priority.

I suppose an alternative solution would be for us to just make a separate guild solely for the purpose of world assignment (We ended up in different guilds since we were on different servers), then after the assignment people can switch to whichever one they want.

Sorry if this was already suggested.

[morrolan.9608]

@Kamsin.8541 said:But what is the max player cap per guild (WvW) ? It's the main issue here.One alliance of 2 guilds = 1 server or worth, only one guild = 1 server

I imagine the player cap is 500 ie every person in the guild. I think its been noted that 1 alliance cannot be the majority population on a world/server

[KokopellisFlute.5236]

This will kill WVW. It will be just Ktraining. There will be no incentive do anything but get in huge groups and try to have a high KDR.

[KokopellisFlute.5236]

@McKenna Berdrow.2759 said:

@Strider Pj.2193 said:

@McKenna Berdrow.2759 said:

@Roxanne.6140 said:So exactly how are players being valuated? If someone were to run a support tank build and doesn't output as many numbers as a damage dealer, is this person going to the dumps for being unvaluable?

Players are mostly being evaluated with play hours. We are also looking into commander time and squad size, time of day, and participation levels.

Will there be a limit as to how many guilds are allowed in each alliance?

Yes. That number of guilds is still being determined but there will cap. It will also depend on the guilds size. For example an alliance might be able to have 5 small guilds before it is full, while another alliance might only be able to have 2 big guilds before it is full.

All you will do is create a system where all the best fight guilds are in one alliance and WVW is DEAD. It will be Ktrain city. That is boring as heck. I will be gone. No reason to stick around for what amounts to PVE. Keeps and Towers become world bosses to be Ktrained over and over and over. BORING!

[hunkamania.7561]

@KokopellisFlute.5236 said:

@McKenna Berdrow.2759 said:

@Strider Pj.2193 said:

@McKenna Berdrow.2759 said:

@Roxanne.6140 said:So exactly how are players being valuated? If someone were to run a support tank build and doesn't output as many numbers as a damage dealer, is this person going to the dumps for being unvaluable?

Players are mostly being evaluated with play hours. We are also looking into commander time and squad size, time of day, and participation levels.

Will there be a limit as to how many guilds are allowed in each alliance?

Yes. That number of guilds is still being determined but there will cap. It will also depend on the guilds size. For example an alliance might be able to have 5 small guilds before it is full, while another alliance might only be able to have 2 big guilds before it is full.

All you will do is create a system where all the best fight guilds are in one alliance and WVW is DEAD. It will be Ktrain city. That is boring as heck. I will be gone. No reason to stick around for what amounts to PVE. Keeps and Towers become world bosses to be Ktrained over and over and over. BORING!

Why would all he best fighters join the same alliance? They could do that right now if they wanted to lol

[Kekkei Genkai Kage.5930]

@KokopellisFlute.5236 said:

@McKenna Berdrow.2759 said:

@Strider Pj.2193 said:

@McKenna Berdrow.2759 said:

@Roxanne.6140 said:So exactly how are players being valuated? If someone were to run a support tank build and doesn't output as many numbers as a damage dealer, is this person going to the dumps for being unvaluable?

Players are mostly being evaluated with play hours. We are also looking into commander time and squad size, time of day, and participation levels.

Will there be a limit as to how many guilds are allowed in each alliance?

Yes. That number of guilds is still being determined but there will cap. It will also depend on the guilds size. For example an alliance might be able to have 5 small guilds before it is full, while another alliance might only be able to have 2 big guilds before it is full.

All you will do is create a system where all the best fight guilds are in one alliance and WVW is DEAD. It will be Ktrain city. That is boring as heck. I will be gone. No reason to stick around for what amounts to PVE. Keeps and Towers become world bosses to be Ktrained over and over and over. BORING!

Do you even know how fight guilds work?? No actual good fight guilds want to be on a same server alliance because they will lose the chance to fight good fights and have good gvgs...do your research.