Richard.8207

I’m an introvert. Guilds have expectations I can fail to meet. The world has no expectations of me. Guilds are social by design, and I’m an introvert. I would have to spend time and energy finding that group. They’d probably be social. I already have a server. In fact I have more than one since I have multiple accounts. That guild wouldn’t provide as many tags at predictable times as an entire server does. I can do the same things as you can, so this is just an insulting question. I’ll ignore it so I don’t get more annoyed. There is no solution trying to maintain community while also forcing everyone to have more diverse WvW experiences. You’d have to have two options, so basically a server queue and a “balance the fights” queue. The balance queue would obviously have diverse experiences, while the servers would just be more balanced versions of what exists today. This works in other games, but is apparently undesirable to the developers. (It was surely considered as it is the most common solution to this type of problem) The only impact of this elitism is the impact on how friendly the environment is to randoms. A large casual alliance will not have even close to the same coverage of tags to join as the entire server has, especially as the most knowledgeable and dedicated players have the most reason to ensure they join an appropriate group. No single guild fixes wanting to play with different groups at different times. If someone plays with 3 different groups of 4 people, but each of those people play with 3 groups of 4, it chains into far too large a group (12 at first stage, 96 at 2nd stage, 768 at 3rd stage, etc). And a lot of people play with more than 3 groups or groups larger than 4 people. Someone will prioritize one of their other groups, and rightly so as people have different priorities. The end result will likely mean casuals that enjoy hanging out with hardcore players on their “off day” won’t get to do so any more. I’ll skip role playing questions as I can’t answer for role players.

Of course people will game the system. If pins get valued, trolls will run pins just to tank whoever gets stuck with them in the next matchup. If you count kill-death ratios, people will tank one account while playing another. The only way to avoid gaming the system is aligning rewards properly to make gaming the system cost more than it gains, and the more complicated the system is, the harder it is to align rewards properly. There’s a reason so many games use little beyond ELO for matchmaking, and give better rewards for higher ratings.

Assume a guild is casual enough to take someone who plays WvW once or twice a month. That means maybe 5-10 people max you are familiar with at peak times during the week, and any off-peak time generally zero. Can you not see how that is different from the entire world being the same people week after week? But let us also be honest here. This is one of the most obvious issues, and the developers have considered it and decided it is not a priority. In fact, they put as a main benefit a contradictory “Diversify WvW experiences”. One cannot get a sense of community from a constantly shifting experience. The developers rejected the more common (much easier) solution to this problem of having random queues side-by-side with non-random queues, diving far enough into this more complicated approach to publicly announce it. So, you can quite safely assume concern for community won’t significantly impact the design decisions being made. And who knows, maybe that’s the right business decision.

Do you not see what you are saying? Community is important but you don't want to join a community. It makes no sense. Elitism of others has nothing to do with that. Community is a lot more than a guild in the game, just like community is more than your bowling team or even entire church congregation in the real world. I can not protect my community in the game by joining a single guild or alliance.

This somewhat begs the questionWhy, if you want to play with specific people, are you unwilling to guild or alliance with them?Why do you want to play with specific people who are unwilling to guild or alliance with you? While I cannot speak for Neph, this applies to me as well. I am casual. I don’t want another guild or alliance. But I do want to feel like I know what the heck is going on. And if the same person is running the same style group with the same tag at the same time every week, I feel comfortable with that. I eventually know how to interact with them in a positive way. Big Mez runs HoT train and DS meta every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday starting at 5pm and going past 10. I like knowing that. If I’m on on one of those days, I might join in. But I don’t want to join a specific guild just to have that option. Same thing with WvW. I want to be able to get familiar with the community. That community aspect is the important part of the game to me. If not for community, I’d be playing a different game.

Just curious if you recognize you said casuals “will be lost to the mists”? I agree that would happen, but as a casual I’d rather not be lost in the shuffle.

This is exactly what people are talking about when they say elitism will ruin this new system. I do not blame you at all, by the way. The system basically demands elitism. You only have X slots in an alliance, and you want the most fun possible to result from those slots, so you want people most committed to adding to your enjoyment to have those slots. Your response is the only one that makes sense. But hopefully you can understand casual players are not served well at all. The thing is most casual players, myself included, recognize the hardcore players create the environment we have. The hardcore players have the required knowledge and expertise to lead everyone else. So I definitely want you to have tons of fun. But I also really hope the developers make a system that encourages a positive experience for casual players. But you guys will be wasting so much energy coordinating with the other guilds that random casuals will be an after thought. And I would completely understand.

Yes, dynamic load balancing. Trying to predict eight weeks of behavior is insane, especially since players are really good at gaming any system created. Why destroy the server communities and virtually guarantee a toxic environment just to make the problem harder to solve?

Because who is going to want to play on the losing side over playing on their server? If your server is massively undermanned at a given moment, wouldn’t you rather join a random server that has a balanced fight? And if that doesn’t appeal to you, can you truly not imagine anyone would choose the balanced fight? at any given time there may be as many as 8 servers getting beaten very badly assuming one server from each matchup is dominating. so which of the 8 is the one that gets the bandwagon at the cost of the other 7? And when everyone from the other losing servers flocks to the one server that becomes the bandwagon what are the people in the winning servers supposed to do sit there looking at empty bls? or abandon their winning server to help their enemy beat them?Not everyone could flock to a bandwagon server. The game would assign players to the match it wants balanced. Basic concept of load balancing. When it gets balanced, the game would assign new entrants to the next match it wants balanced. Which match to balance would probably use mismatch sizes and expected inflow of players through the pug queue. The developers can also adjust queues to adjust size of mismatch allowed. This is all just basic load balancing. They’d surely have interesting issues to solve, but the basic concept is used a ton throughout the Internet.

Because who is going to want to play on the losing side over playing on their server? If your server is massively undermanned at a given moment, wouldn’t you rather join a random server that has a balanced fight? And if that doesn’t appeal to you, can you truly not imagine anyone would choose the balanced fight?

If the goal is handling population fluctuations and balance, why not just let people join the underpowered sides? Either let anyone from any server join the underpowered side through a different WvW entrance, or make some servers queueless mercenary/pug servers that join whoever is in need. I’d rather find a commander who wants to lead pugs than deal with needing to reorganize everything every 8-week cycle. And I’d definitely rather not have a system that virtually requires elitism.

Gw2crafts.net