A (possible) way to solve the time coverage problem and the issue of the population imbalance

[Cristalyan.5728]

One of the most used arguments for the actual state of the WvW (no matter if in US or EU) is the population inbalance. The Alliance system, working in the same way as the actual Server system will change nothing. Maybe it will bring some money to ANet before WvW perishes.

A (possible) method to address the imbalance (and the other big problem - the coverage) is to keep the actual linking system and to always link an US server with an EU server - only for WvW. In this way, due of the time differences, no matter the hour, the map will be populated and you will find fights - this is the coverage problem. The population problem ... HM. I bet that the most interesting matches will be in T2-T4. But I think we can find an eventual balance even here.

I know, the databases for the two regions are on different servers. But a system for keeping the evidence of a player apartenence to a server exists (It may be a flag - different for each server). That means it is possible to have "neutral" separate servers containing 4 maps where a player will be redirected when pushing the WvW button - no matter on what region it is. The actual megaserver system will remain only for PvE.

The technical problems are difficult, but nothing is impossible and this can be a start of the long awaited WvW rework. We can hope, the ANet developers (when allowed to do their job and not when forced to .... fulfill the marketing Dept. orders) are very skillful. I saw how two devs. from ANet not only maintain the old GW1 but they even updated it working on their free time. And they migrated the old GW1 servers on the Amazon cloud - so, we can be confident that ANet have the technical skill to do this.

We only need to have the administrative support, too. Because even without being an expert, I suppose this method costs some money.

Also, we may expect some language problems for such links, but I think we experienced them already, so, I think, this is not so game-breaking,

What do you think?

[DemonSeed.3528]

I think the first thing that will be complained about would be ping, and it would be one of the many excuses for losing XD

[Voltekka.2375]

Oh yiss. Blackgate with a full EU server. Oh boi cant wait for balance! Plus watcha gonna do about the abyssmal lag?

[SWI.4127]

A guildie and I were talking about EU/US server merging, and he suggested that at a certain hour, they could shut down WvW for a few minutes and switch over to EU server so the EU players get good ping in their primetime. Then it could switch back to NA servers for NA prime, and I guess maybe OCX and SEA assuming they get better ping on NA servers.

[avey.4201]

If you want to fix population, do away with servers, when someone joins they'd be automatically sent to faction with lowest population or score depending anets preference, if you want to wvw with some guildies form a party, and the party will be sent to faction with lowest population or score, but exempt squads from this as you'd have a potential to be 50 players heavy on one faction.This would not hurt guild missions as most require 3-5 per checkpoint, and those who require more eg world xp are already compatible across faction.Joining while in a squad should be treated as solo/no party, you can join a squad in WvW.Party joining should be similar to PvP parties to prevent abuse eg. all players not in an instance would get a confirmation to queue together to prevent funnel parties.Then adjust warclaw to dolyak " or default player" speed "eg. necro/guardian", remove attack skills, give mount +10 or 20 supply carry capacity you lose on dismount as zergs are able to respond too fast currently, and this would encourage small havoc groups to sneakily go siege things.

[Cristalyan.5728]

@Voltekka.2375 said:Oh yiss. Blackgate with a full EU server. Oh boi cant wait for balance! Plus watcha gonna do about the abyssmal lag?

HM - I was thinking at linking a firs tier UA with a last tier EU/ and a first tier EU with a last tier UA - something like this. In this way the overal power of the link will be (almost) the same. Or, at least, in a tolerable margin. But if you think at linking a T1 UA + a T1 EU ..... then this is not even trying to balance something.

And YES, the lag may be a problem. But I remember my first online game I played - MechWarrior. At that time (1998 - 1999) I used a modem connection. The Battlezone was (most probably) in UA. And from EU I had a ping going from 80 to around 300. The lag was not something so disturbing. Repeat, on a 56k modem connection.

I think that now, after +20 years of technical advances the lag should not be a problem if (repeat, IF) ANet will buy (and pay for) a service with a very low latency.

[XenesisII.1540]

The idea is probably as old as the game, suggested many times. They've already said it's a no some years ago, the physical servers are on two continents. Never mind the lag which you can already get a taste of if you switch your account to the other side, also the Aussies have been telling us about lag from playing on NA servers from day one. As for cloud technology, it's still fairly new for gaming, how well does it work with a massive online game? how well would it work for wvw? Even if you were link everyone together it still wouldn't solve the population problems if it's left in players hands, as the last 7 years has shown, the alliance system and the automatic sorting is still needed.

The population problem is a two step problem, one is too many stack on a couple servers for years which that alone could give a server a huge advantage, that will be partly addressed with alliances when worlds are fully shuffled every 2 months (this part is important and needed no matter what in order to bring out stuff like tournaments which will be on a more fair playground than current), also "partly addressed" because transfers might still be a big thing depending on how they handle it, but a reset two months later fixes that. Second problem is coverage since wvw is a 24/7 game mode, the alliance system could also solve part of this problem by including time zones in their sorting, but that isn't going to be in from the start, but they've already stated it's possible to do along with other sorting options.

Simply opening it up so everyone around the world plays on the same server isn't going to solve the population problem if players continue their routine to move and stack to whatever is their fotm world.

The only other questions is.... how many players are still going to be around by the time this manages to come out, and is it even going to matter at that point when wvw gameplay is already beyond stale, and the class meta and balance is still terribad.

[Swagger.1459]

@"Cristalyan.5728" said:One of the most used arguments for the actual state of the WvW (no matter if in US or EU) is the population inbalance. The Alliance system, working in the same way as the actual Server system will change nothing. Maybe it will bring some money to ANet before WvW perishes.

A (possible) method to address the imbalance (and the other big problem - the coverage) is to keep the actual linking system and to always link an US server with an EU server - only for WvW. In this way, due of the time differences, no matter the hour, the map will be populated and you will find fights - this is the coverage problem. The population problem ... HM. I bet that the most interesting matches will be in T2-T4. But I think we can find an eventual balance even here.

I know, the databases for the two regions are on different servers. But a system for keeping the evidence of a player apartenence to a server exists (It may be a flag - different for each server). That means it is possible to have "neutral" separate servers containing 4 maps where a player will be redirected when pushing the WvW button - no matter on what region it is. The actual megaserver system will remain only for PvE.

The technical problems are difficult, but nothing is impossible and this can be a start of the long awaited WvW rework. We can hope, the ANet developers (when allowed to do their job and not when forced to .... fulfill the marketing Dept. orders) are very skillful. I saw how two devs. from ANet not only maintain the old GW1 but they even updated it working on their free time. And they migrated the old GW1 servers on the Amazon cloud - so, we can be confident that ANet have the technical skill to do this.

We only need to have the administrative support, too. Because even without being an expert, I suppose this method costs some money.

Also, we may expect some language problems for such links, but I think we experienced them already, so, I think, this is not so game-breaking,

What do you think?

It’s not gonna happen.

[XenesisII.1540]

Was looking up some dev posts for another thread ran across the post on the merge. 7 years ago and times change, but anyways...

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Merge-the-EU-US-Servers/page/1#post673248

The North American and European data centers are different in one important respect: they are located on different continents. North American players connecting to the NA data center (and European Union players connecting to the EU data center) will generally experience lower latency and a higher likelihood of playing with larger groups of other players, as those in the same data center tend to operate during similar times of the day. So there are real distinctions between the data centers which their EU/NA affiliations make clear and for that reason we will not be removing their continent designations.

We don’t match up worlds from multiple data centers for similar reasons. Ultimately, the server that runs a WvW map must live somewhere in the world and the players who connect from that same continent will have a distinct advantage over those connecting from another continent due to lower latency. In order to keep things as fair as possible to all involved we keep the matchups within each data center.

Of course it is always possible for an EU player to choose to play on an NA server, or vice-versa, but in doing so that player is choosing to take on the burden of additional latency. That situation is vastly different from our matching system placing an entire team at a latency disadvantage without their knowledge or consent.

tl;dr: data centers are on different continents, latency is an issue with inter-continental connections, data center distinctions are here to stay.

[Brother.1504]

Anet won’t be able to balance wvw. The players will always work hard to leverage any advantage. We the players work against anet when it come to balance. All those “fite guilds” bandwagon to stack fotm servers is a good example of this.

[Sovereign.1093]

less tiers.

seasonal purge of population so players can rechoose servers and no one server remains over stacked and institute guild rankings so guilds can actually be at war not just in spirit.

sov's statement of account

legendary gs, mace, shield, and trinkets

ty.

[XenesisII.1540]

You will never be able to balance a large amount of players unless you do two things, shorten the time or play, or use instances, and wvw is neither. No one in their right minds would expect perfect balance with population, with coverage, with classes, or anything else in the game, doesn't mean they shouldn't work on improving systems to help deal with the imbalances.

Every time the topic comes on population people come in here and harp about alliances will do nothing, maybe, maybe not, but it's better than what we currently have, which is let players have free reign to destroy the balance with nothing in place to reset or fix that. So people can come in here claim it won't work, they have a better system in mind, suggest systems 20 different other ways, at the end of the day there's nothing I've seen that will work better to preserve the large population maps with 24/7 game play of wvw while keeping a large portion of players in their communities.

[displayname.8315]

@"avey.4201" said:If you want to fix population, do away with servers, when someone joins they'd be automatically sent to faction with lowest population or score depending anets preference, if you want to wvw with some guildies form a party, and the party will be sent to faction with lowest population or score, but exempt squads from this as you'd have a potential to be 50 players heavy on one faction.This would not hurt guild missions as most require 3-5 per checkpoint, and those who require more eg world xp are already compatible across faction.Joining while in a squad should be treated as solo/no party, you can join a squad in WvW.Party joining should be similar to PvP parties to prevent abuse eg. all players not in an instance would get a confirmation to queue together to prevent funnel parties.Then adjust warclaw to dolyak " or default player" speed "eg. necro/guardian", remove attack skills, give mount +10 or 20 supply carry capacity you lose on dismount as zergs are able to respond too fast currently, and this would encourage small havoc groups to sneakily go siege things.

That's what EotM should have been. They linked EotM to the servers though so it was a waste of a good feature. The servers system is the root cause.

[Diku.2546]

Slowly raises hand...

chuckles

Time coverage & population imbalance is a natural part of this game mode & the mechanics should already be designed to use them in a positive way...which is not the case...and the reason WvW is so screwed up.

WvW NEEDS to use these (2) "problems" in a positive way, but we would need to change the core match-up mechanics to make it happen. I've been saying how to fix this for over 3 years now.

The solution isn't a simple fixing of the core match-up model...so even if you fix this...you need to be aware of other aspects of WvW.

You'll need to present a solution that also deals with multiple aspects of WvW that are interconnected.

The "Real Solution" needs to to be comprehensive in nature. Most folks are not able to comprehend just how complex & interconnected things are...so trying to explain things in a single post will prove to be an extreme challenge to structure while guiding the discussion.

Take a peek at some of my discussions for ideas in answering your question. I don't have that many discussions for you to go through - only (5) as of this posting with (2) being deleted. Just remember to scroll up to the 1st post of any discussion.

Hope this helps you in getting started.

Yours truly,Diku

Credibility requires critical insight & time.

[kappre.3897]

In NA, getting rid of T4 will prolly solve some pop problems though coverage may still be an issue.

[Dawdler.8521]

@kappre.3897 said:In NA, getting rid of T4 will prolly solve some pop problems though coverage may still be an issue.It doesnt solve any population issues, it just delays it.

But granted, since alliances still seem a fair bit away (if ever) IMO Anet should have deleted T4 NA and T5 EU long ago and merged some of the servers entirerly (national being the prime target for this probably).

[phreeak.1023]

just merge eu servers together. 7 German into 3, 5 French into 2 and 14 international servers into 7. = 12 server and 4 Tiers.and raising the cap so servers dont go on full status.