balance

[gashen.3874]

when are you going to sort out the mess you have made in the eternal battlegrounds,  every friday we change servers and every friday without fail we get one team that vastly outnumbers the others, we then get a week of frustration getting nowhere.  surely its not to much to ask that you balance the numbers so everybody has a fair chance

as it is it is totally pointless.

[joneirikb.7506]

TLDR: Simply put because it is impossible.

 

Servers are not a set number, they're a constantly changing mass, affected by lots of different factors:

 

* External Factors: People's play time depends on things like real-life, family, work, school, sickness, vacations, other plans, like your mother-in-law decides to move in for a week, etc. 

 

* In-game factors: People might do other activities in the game, pve, story, play with their guild/friends, grind out something, etc.

 

* Motivation factors: People get bored, burned out, tired etc. The most obvious is the Fairweather effect, people love winning and hate losing, so when your side lose, players leave. This has a chain reaction that you lose more, and more people leave. This will also make any new fair weathers that enter the map see the overall situation quickly and leave as well. Other times people doesn't find what they're looking for (pug-manders, too zergy for roaming, good group fights, nobody cares about protecting structures etc) and lose interest and leave.

 

* Systematic factors: Even without all these constant changes, servers are inherently mis-balanced, because players have tried to stack servers for 9 years now, Kaineng vs Blackgate for example would never be a good match. And even when they link servers together to try to combat this, the PLAYER BASE completely ruin the attempt within a couple of days of each re-link, by transferring around in order to try to stack servers again. Even if ANet managed to balance the population 100% on a re-link (They can't, but for the sake of the argument), players would kitten that up within a couple of days, and we're back to what we got now, and has had for the last 8.5 years.

 

If you ever find a moment where you think the game is actually balanced in WvW, enjoy it! Because that's just pure random, and it will self destruct at first given chance. That is literally how WvW is designed.

Edited June 19, 2021 by joneirikb.7506

[LetoII.3782]

People stay logged in when they're winning.

People logout when they're losing.

Only way to fix it is to remove some positive reinforcement, provide a catch-up mechanic.

 

But don't hold your breath, gw2 has leaned into biggest-stack-wins design consistently.

[Dralor.3701]

Rewards in the game mode are just too poor to keep people around if they are getting steamrolled. 
 

Pretty boring being on the winning side too when there is nobody to fight.

[joneirikb.7506]

3 hours ago, Dralor.3701 said:

Rewards in the game mode are just too poor to keep people around if they are getting steamrolled. 
 

Pretty boring being on the winning side too when there is nobody to fight.

If the rewards where better, people wouldn't enjoy WvW any more, they'd just stomach it better, by trying to forget about what they're doing and focusing on the shiny stuff at the end. Which typically leads to more burn-out. 

If the rewards are "good enough" that people do WvW over other things, then server stacking, and complaints about servers open/close would go up by a magnitude, as the entire game population would try their best to get in on the same server, to steamroll for rewards. How this affects the game mode, for those that actually enjoys WvW wouldn't even be on their mind, and the game mode would likely de-evolve into the kind of EotM karma train we had at the worst.

Rewards are never the answer. Rewards only get people in short term, and usually deplete long term.