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World Restructuring FAQ


Raymond Lukes.6305

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  • ArenaNet Staff

We wanted to create a new post that is a FAQ to the world restructuring post, and clarify a few points that some have found confusing. Please feel free to continue to comment on the world restructuring post (McKenna and I are still working through all the questions), or on this post with feedback. I just wanted these topics to be easier to find for everyone, and figured a new post would be a good way to do this.

Note: If you do have a question that is not related to world restructuring, please create a new forum post. We are going to ask the moderators to be more heavy handed with removing off topic posts in this thread and the world restructuring thread, as they are already very large.

Q. How big are alliances in comparison to world sizes?

500 players is around 20-25% of WvW world sizes currently (this is only using players we consider active WvW players). Therefore, a single alliance can be a significant size of a world population but not the majority.

Q. Will I have to represent my WvW Guild at all times to play WvW?

You can represent whatever guild you want. A WvW Guild is only for world creation purposes.

Q. 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 be a 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.

Q. How does the game determine if a player is French/Spanish/German? In game language?

Guilds will be able to set their language. An alliance will take the language of the guild that created it. If you are not playing with a guild then we would like to give players an option to set a preference for the language they would like to play with. We may also add the language preference setting for the alliance.

Q. Is the setting to be a WvW guild independent from the Guild Mission settings?

It is independent. It will be a new setting launching with the system.

Q.If a guild has a large population but only a portion of that guild actually plays WvW, would they have to make a new guild in order to keep the population accurate?

No. Only players who set that guild as their WvW guild will count towards that guilds WvW population.

Q. Will we be able to have an 'alliance' chat the way we had in gw1?

This is something we have thought about and are defiantly going to investigate.

Q. What about inactive players? A player comes back and wants to join his guild that is already part of an alliance/world. Can he just join them with ease?

Possibly. That inactive player should set their guild as their WvW guild so next season they are guaranteed to be able to play with their guild. They might be able to play with their guild during the current season if the guild is on a world that is not full. Then the new system would recommend that world to the player when they enter WvW.

Q. How this will affect Roleplayers?

This is something we had not fully considered and we will start looking into possible solutions.

Q. I am officially NA playing on EU, when we get regrouped or resorted will I be staying on EU or automatically on NA?

You will stay in whatever region you are currently in.

Q. Will/can we get the information about the alliance via the API?

We plan on updating the API so that it can recognize the new worlds created with World Restructuring.

Q. Are there going to be reward changes with this system?

We want to release the system and make sure it meets all of our goals before adding/tweaking WvW rewards.

Q. If a player changes their alliance server or main WvW guild, when or how long before it becomes active?

It will become "active" when the next season starts. So if you change your WvW guild in the middle of season 1, you won’t be sorted onto the same world as them until season 2.

Q. In PvP, I have a tendency not to get linked with people I've blocked? Will the relinking be affect that? Or can we get a guild block list?

We will look into this, but world restructuring will probably not consider the block list. It becomes too difficult to create massive worlds if it has to consider block lists when creating them.

Q. How will inactive players becoming active again affect alliances. E.g. An alliance is close to the max capacity and a few inactive guildies return, mark their guild as their WvW guild and > put the alliance over the population cap.

If the alliance is capped no more players can join. It would be up to the guild on how they want to handle having those guildies play with them. Leaving the alliance and creating a new one, is what I expect most guilds would try and do. They could also leave the alliance and decide to just be sorted as a guild in the next season.

Q. What will happen with eotm? Will it be removed and integrated as a normal map?

EotM will remain the same as it does now.

Q. How many servers will there be? Will this be evolving or a constant?

The number of worlds can change every season. The number will always be divisible by three, but one season could have 12 world and the next could have 15 based on the need of the population.

Q. Will all servers be tried to balance at the same level or at rough tiers? I'd imagine with the EU language restrictions it will be more difficult to achieve that.

The goal is to have worlds be balanced at the same level. That way we can create great matches. We are not trying to make 3 tier-one-worlds and then 3 tier-two-worlds etc.

Q. Does this mean the more casual players cannot play with the more hardcore WvW players?

A world can be made up of "casuals" and "hardcore" WvW players. The system uses stats like play hours in WvW, commander time and squad size, time of day, and participation levels to create worlds that are balanced. Some of the new worlds might have more hardcore players and some might have less but overall the new worlds should have similar play hours.

Q. What is beneficial in this system to roamers?

Moment to moment gameplay should be similar to how it is now for roamers, except now that matches are more balanced, the objectives roamers take, and point’s roamers earn for their world will have a bigger impact on the match. When the worlds are balanced anything anyone does matters a lot more, because it is not going to be made irrelevant by the much bigger world.If you want to guarantee playing with other roamers that you are friends with, then you can make a guild. If you do not want to do that, then there should still be plenty of roamers on the new worlds.I’ve seen some roamers worried about this system, and I’d be interested in hearing what in this system could change to make it better for roamers in their opinions. If you could mark your account as a WvW roamer account, and the system guaranteed a percentage of roamers on each world, would that feel better? Or is there anything else we could do besides use a different system. We would love to hear other ideas, and even though we haven’t been able to respond to everything we have been reading it all and taking notes.

Q. What is the deal with this Player Score, Value, Evaluation etc?

There has been a lot of discussion about the player “evaluation.” We already use play hours to determine population status of a world and when we refer to player value or evaluation or score we are talking about play hours with some kind of scalar adjustment. With this system, moving people around every two months we would like to track a few more things that can help us distribute players more effectively. One thing we are looking at tracking is commanding. Commanders are a big part of WvW no matter if your prefer scouting, roaming, running with a havoc squad or the zerg. Commanders are not the only piece to the WvW puzzle but they are a big piece. We would use commander time and squad sizes to determine a scaler to that commander players play time. For example, these are not the real values but I am not even a full cup of coffee in so for my sake I am going to make the math easy, PlayerA, PlayerB and PlayerC all play for roughly 100 hours a week. PlayerA commands smaller havoc squads, PlayerB is a PUG zerg commander, and PlayerC does not command. For all the time a commander is commanding squads let us say of more than two and less than size ten we’ll count those hours at a one and a half times multiplier and higher than ten we’ll count it at two times. If Player A were always commanding, in the small squad range, while playing their time, adjusted hours would be 150 hours. If PlayerB were always commanding, in the large squad range, while playing, their adjusted hours would be 200. Since Player C did not command their hours, remain the same at 100. Doing this can help us get more even matches. WvW is not completely a number of bodies game. A hundred veteran players will always beat a hundred casual players.

Image of all the worlds in NA and EU ordered by size

1uFZPf9.png

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@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:

Q. 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 be a 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.

What about for guilds that share players? This sounds like it limits those guilds. I thought alliance cap will be based on population.

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A big concern for many people is the abuse of Alliances. Other than Alliance size, how will you ensure players will not abuse these changes and dominate the matches by gaming the system? Players will try to figure out what process you use to determine Alliance matchups and they will try to manipulate them to give themselves a better grouping (pairing with other strong alliances, guilds, etc) for their next match.

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@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:Q. How will inactive players becoming active again affect alliances. E.g. An alliance is close to the max capacity and a few inactive guildies return, mark their guild as their WvW guild and > put the alliance over the population cap.If the alliance is capped no more players can join. It would be up to the guild on how they want to handle having those guildies play with them. Leaving the alliance and creating a new one, is what I expect most guilds would try and do. They could also leave the alliance and decide to just be sorted as a guild in the next season.

Suggestion: Allow guild ranks with member editing permissions (kick/role moving/etc) to manually toggle somebody's "wvw flag" off. So if a guild wants to use a slot for a new player, and has a quit/less than wonderful current player they would want to trade out, it's possible without kicking the old member or trying to talk/force them into de-flagging themselves.

@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:Q. What is the deal with this Player Score, Value, Evaluation etc?One thing we are looking at tracking is commanding. Commanders are a big part of WvW no matter if your prefer scouting, roaming, running with a havoc squad or the zerg. Commanders are not the only piece to the WvW puzzle but they are a big piece. We would use commander time and squad sizes to determine a scaler to that commander players play time. For example, these are not the real values but I am not even a full cup of coffee in so for my sake I am going to make the math easy, PlayerA, PlayerB and PlayerC all play for roughly 100 hours a week. PlayerA commands smaller havoc squads, PlayerB is a PUG zerg commander, and PlayerC does not command. For all the time a commander is commanding squads let us say of more than two and less than size ten we’ll count those hours at a one and a half times multiplier and higher than ten we’ll count it at two times. If Player A were always commanding, in the small squad range, while playing their time, adjusted hours would be 150 hours. If PlayerB were always commanding, in the large squad range, while playing, their adjusted hours would be 200. Since Player C did not command their hours, remain the same at 100. Doing this can help us get more even matches. WvW is not completely a number of bodies game. A hundred veteran players will always beat a hundred casual players.

Suggestion: Use metrics like closed/open squad status in addition to squad size and how much of the squad is on the commander's guild/alliance rosters to determine and seperate pubmanders from guildmanders/fightmanders/etc. Having a healthy mix of commanders which want to have a solid small core, vs ones which want to hoover up pubs, is important for both commanders/areas of their respective communities to have what they want. A server with only guildmanders leaves nowhere for pubs, and a server with only pubmanders has no forces other guildmanders would want to actually fight. Heavy difference of kind.

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@"Chaba.5410" said:What about for guilds that share players? This sounds like it limits those guilds. I thought alliance cap will be based on population.Each person can only designate a single guild as their "wvw" guild. You can be in other guilds that also do WvW, but, for purposes of being assigned to a side in a specific match up, only the designated guild counts.

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@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@"Chaba.5410" said:What about for guilds that share players? This sounds like it limits those guilds. I thought alliance cap will be based on population.Each person can only designate a single guild as their "wvw" guild. You can be in other guilds that also do WvW, but, for purposes of being assigned to a side in a specific match up, only the designated guild counts.

Exactly, so those guilds with shared members form an alliance but the alliance is potentially capped on number of guilds. How will that work?

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@Chaba.5410 said:

@Chaba.5410 said:What about for guilds that share players? This sounds like it limits those guilds. I thought alliance cap will be based on population.Each person can only designate a single guild as their "wvw" guild. You can be in other guilds that also do WvW, but, for purposes of being assigned to a side in a specific match up, only the designated guild counts.

Exactly, so those guilds with shared members form an alliance but the alliance is potentially capped on number of guilds. How will that work?

they will have to choose between Furry A or Furry B. or Furry A and Furry B will have to be in the same alliance.

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@shiri.4257 said:

@Chaba.5410 said:What about for guilds that share players? This sounds like it limits those guilds. I thought alliance cap will be based on population.Each person can only designate a single guild as their "wvw" guild. You can be in other guilds that also do WvW, but, for purposes of being assigned to a side in a specific match up, only the designated guild counts.

Exactly, so those guilds with shared members form an alliance but the alliance is potentially capped on number of guilds. How will that work?

they will have to choose between Furry A or Furry B. or Furry A and Furry B will have to be in the same alliance.

I feel like you aren't reading what the FAQ question and answer was.

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@Chaba.5410 said:

@Chaba.5410 said:What about for guilds that share players? This sounds like it limits those guilds. I thought alliance cap will be based on population.Each person can only designate a single guild as their "wvw" guild. You can be in other guilds that also do WvW, but, for purposes of being assigned to a side in a specific match up, only the designated guild counts.

Exactly, so those guilds with shared members form an alliance but the alliance is potentially capped on number of guilds. How will that work?

they will have to choose between Furry A or Furry B. or Furry A and Furry B will have to be in the same alliance.

I feel like you aren't reading what the FAQ question and answer was.

oh, we've been suspecting it being a cap parameter 1) # of guilds AND 2) population. IE: 5 guilds AND 500 PLAYERS. but your designated guild is the one that reflects your alliance world location. your 2nd guild if not in the alliance or figured a work around, will be be in pug heaven. i think the misconception are people looking at it as an OR cap. the shared guilds will have to work on being in the same alliance or a work around like merging temporarily with 1 guild for wvw designation. then rep the other guild. All in all the combination of 2 guilds in 1 will push the total alliance player cap in the numbers but leave spots for guild max parameter.

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@shiri.4257 said:

@Chaba.5410 said:What about for guilds that share players? This sounds like it limits those guilds. I thought alliance cap will be based on population.Each person can only designate a single guild as their "wvw" guild. You can be in other guilds that also do WvW, but, for purposes of being assigned to a side in a specific match up, only the designated guild counts.

Exactly, so those guilds with shared members form an alliance but the alliance is potentially capped on number of guilds. How will that work?

they will have to choose between Furry A or Furry B. or Furry A and Furry B will have to be in the same alliance.

I feel like you aren't reading what the FAQ question and answer was.

oh, we've been suspecting it being a cap parameter 1) # of guilds AND 2) population. IE: 5 guilds AND 500 PLAYERS. but your designated guild is the one that reflects your alliance world location. your 2nd guild if not in the alliance or figured a work around, will be be in pug heaven. i think the misconception are people looking at it as an OR cap. the shared guilds will have to work on being in the same alliance or a work around like merging temporarily with 1 guild for wvw designation. then rep the other guild. All in all the combination of 2 guilds in 1 will push the total alliance player cap in the numbers but leave spots for guild max parameter.

OK let me give example...

There's possibly four main guilds. They all rally at different times. They all share some members and want to keep everyone together, which is the purpose of an alliance - keeping a community together. They also want to invite two other small guilds who provide havoc support/scouting and also have a few shared members. The number of people in total is about less than 150 players spread out across several timezones. But let's say the alliance is capped at 5 guilds. Basically the only way then to keep the players together is to have everyone become a member of one of the guilds and they have to set that to their WvW guild. That sounds silly, especially if not everyone in every one of those guilds has an open guild slot. What is the purpose then of an alliance if people have to use a single guild to ensure staying together? It means basically that we should just be creating a single "floater" guild as the alliance rather than create an alliance.

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What is missing in this FAQ is the outnumbered bonus, assuming the ideal situation of (near) equal population balance and time coverage would mean that the outnumbered bonus would be gone. Are those pips going to be moved to other criteria (multiple tiers of commitment) or will they be a thing of the past?

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@Chaba.5410 said:

@Chaba.5410 said:What about for guilds that share players? This sounds like it limits those guilds. I thought alliance cap will be based on population.Each person can only designate a single guild as their "wvw" guild. You can be in other guilds that also do WvW, but, for purposes of being assigned to a side in a specific match up, only the designated guild counts.

Exactly, so those guilds with shared members form an alliance but the alliance is potentially capped on number of guilds. How will that work?

they will have to choose between Furry A or Furry B. or Furry A and Furry B will have to be in the same alliance.

I feel like you aren't reading what the FAQ question and answer was.

oh, we've been suspecting it being a cap parameter 1) # of guilds AND 2) population. IE: 5 guilds AND 500 PLAYERS. but your designated guild is the one that reflects your alliance world location. your 2nd guild if not in the alliance or figured a work around, will be be in pug heaven. i think the misconception are people looking at it as an OR cap. the shared guilds will have to work on being in the same alliance or a work around like merging temporarily with 1 guild for wvw designation. then rep the other guild. All in all the combination of 2 guilds in 1 will push the total alliance player cap in the numbers but leave spots for guild max parameter.

OK let me give example...

There's possibly four main guilds. They all rally at different times. They all share some members and want to keep everyone together, which is the purpose of an alliance - keeping a community together. They also want to invite two other small guilds who provide havoc support/scouting and also have a few shared members. The number of people in total is about less than 150 players spread out across several timezones. But let's say the alliance is capped at 5 guilds. Basically the only way then to keep the players together is to have everyone become a member of one of the guilds and they have to set that to their WvW guild. That sounds silly, especially if not everyone in every one of those guilds has an open guild slot. What is the purpose then of an alliance if people have to use a single guild to ensure staying together? It means basically that we should just be creating a single "floater" guild as the alliance rather than create an alliance.

Yup that's the work around. Or release them from a 4 Time zone raid sweat shop. Free the pugs! Silly but forces some choices that need to be made.

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Can we get a 6th guild slot as a designated WvW guild so we don't have to leave a current one to find a new Wvw guild? Since I haven't Wvw much before, it wasn't a priority, but if this restructuring solves why I hate WvW then I might want a WvW guild. Kind of like we got a shared inventory slot for free - could we please get a separate 6th WvW only guild slot?

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@shiri.4257 said:

@Chaba.5410 said:What about for guilds that share players? This sounds like it limits those guilds. I thought alliance cap will be based on population.Each person can only designate a single guild as their "wvw" guild. You can be in other guilds that also do WvW, but, for purposes of being assigned to a side in a specific match up, only the designated guild counts.

Exactly, so those guilds with shared members form an alliance but the alliance is potentially capped on number of guilds. How will that work?

they will have to choose between Furry A or Furry B. or Furry A and Furry B will have to be in the same alliance.

I feel like you aren't reading what the FAQ question and answer was.

oh, we've been suspecting it being a cap parameter 1) # of guilds AND 2) population. IE: 5 guilds AND 500 PLAYERS. but your designated guild is the one that reflects your alliance world location. your 2nd guild if not in the alliance or figured a work around, will be be in pug heaven. i think the misconception are people looking at it as an OR cap. the shared guilds will have to work on being in the same alliance or a work around like merging temporarily with 1 guild for wvw designation. then rep the other guild. All in all the combination of 2 guilds in 1 will push the total alliance player cap in the numbers but leave spots for guild max parameter.

OK let me give example...

There's possibly four main guilds. They all rally at different times. They all share some members and want to keep everyone together, which is the purpose of an alliance - keeping a community together. They also want to invite two other small guilds who provide havoc support/scouting and also have a few shared members. The number of people in total is about less than 150 players spread out across several timezones. But let's say the alliance is capped at 5 guilds. Basically the only way then to keep the players together is to have everyone become a member of one of the guilds and they have to set that to their WvW guild. That sounds silly, especially if not everyone in every one of those guilds has an open guild slot. What is the purpose then of an alliance if people have to use a single guild to ensure staying together? It means basically that we should just be creating a single "floater" guild as the alliance rather than create an alliance.

Yup that's the work around. Or release them from a 4 Time zone raid sweat shop. Free the pugs! Silly but forces some choices that need to be made.

It isn't a work around. It invalidates the purpose of alliances.

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@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:

Q. What is beneficial in this system to roamers?

Moment to moment gameplay should be similar to how it is now for roamers, except now that matches are more balanced, the objectives roamers take, and point’s roamers earn for their world will have a bigger impact on the match. When the worlds are balanced anything anyone does matters a lot more, because it is not going to be made irrelevant by the much bigger world.If you want to guarantee playing with other roamers that you are friends with, then you can make a guild. If you do not want to do that, then there should still be plenty of roamers on the new worlds.I’ve seen some roamers worried about this system, and I’d be interested in hearing what in this system could change to make it better for roamers in their opinions. If you could mark your account as a WvW roamer account, and the system guaranteed a percentage of roamers on each world, would that feel better? Or is there anything else we could do besides use a different system. We would love to hear other ideas, and even though we haven’t been able to respond to everything we have been reading it all and taking notes.

Q. What is the deal with this Player Score, Value, Evaluation etc?

There has been a lot of discussion about the player “evaluation.” We already use play hours to determine population status of a world and when we refer to player value or evaluation or score we are talking about play hours with some kind of scalar adjustment. With this system, moving people around every two months we would like to track a few more things that can help us distribute players more effectively. One thing we are looking at tracking is commanding. Commanders are a big part of WvW no matter if your prefer scouting, roaming, running with a havoc squad or the zerg. Commanders are not the only piece to the WvW puzzle but they are a big piece. We would use commander time and squad sizes to determine a scaler to that commander players play time. For example, these are not the real values but I am not even a full cup of coffee in so for my sake I am going to make the math easy, PlayerA, PlayerB and PlayerC all play for roughly 100 hours a week. PlayerA commands smaller havoc squads, PlayerB is a PUG zerg commander, and PlayerC does not command. For all the time a commander is commanding squads let us say of more than two and less than size ten we’ll count those hours at a one and a half times multiplier and higher than ten we’ll count it at two times. If Player A were always commanding, in the small squad range, while playing their time, adjusted hours would be 150 hours. If PlayerB were always commanding, in the large squad range, while playing, their adjusted hours would be 200. Since Player C did not command their hours, remain the same at 100. Doing this can help us get more even matches. WvW is not completely a number of bodies game. A hundred veteran players will always beat a hundred casual players.

a guranteed percentage of roamers would be great as it can get boring if you dont find any opponents in smallscale. i do think if we already trying to get player scores, we can get them for roamers too. if you mark your account as a roamer your stomps/death ratio could be scored as well as taking objectives of any kind could give the players score depending on how many did participate. for instance 500 points for a keep, if a 50 man squad takes it everyone gets 10 points, if a 5 man group captures it they get 100 points etc. with this you can roughly determine the contribution of a roamer, better then going by playtime. alot of people spending most of their time at a duel spot (nothing against it, i like to watch them from time to time) will still call themselves roamers while not really contributing to the match during this, so you could get a world with a lot of duellists and still few roamers that actually run around doing smallscale stuff.

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@SugarCayne.3098 said:

Q. Will we be able to have an 'alliance' chat the way we had in gw1?

This is something we have thought about and are
defiantly
going to investigate.

Yup. Pretty much sums it up. Great choice of words.

Lol, RIP.

@Raymond Lukes.6305 said:...but I am not even a full cup of coffee in so for my sake I...

You are going to finish that cup of coffee.

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@Uon.7491 said:If that is an Image of all the worlds in NA and EU ordered by size, where are the labels? Unless we are not meant to know?As it says, they hide it to protect the servers.

Considering there is 15 main servers on EU and 12 on NA, the lowest number servers below top 15 are obviously very reliant on link servers.Top ones most likely include Blackgate [NA], Baruch Bay [sP], Desolation [EU], Jade Quarry [NA], Kodash [DE], Riverside [DE], Far shiverpeaks [EU] and Piken Square [EU]considering they are servers that have been unlinked/full in the past few linkings in about that order. Might be some other NA servers, I am not that aware of the state there.

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