dzeRnumbrd.6129

Condi builds actually require burst conditions because condition clearing is too abundant in WvW zergs. So many classes have easy access to AoE condi clearing. If "damaging" conditions were not clearable then you could really tone down conditions and make them far more attrition based. So you would make Damage Conditions unclearable and leave Crown Control/Other conditions clearable: Damage condis: bleed burn confusion poison torment CC condis: blind chilled cripple fear immob slow traunt weakness Other: vuln Right now as it is, if you reduce burst on conditions then you condemn condi builds to the trash heap they used to live in for many years. You look at current meta builds for scourge and they're are all heading down a power/condi hybrid burst (grieving, celestial) instead of a trailblazer path (condi burst + condi duration) because condi clearing is so strong that having +expertise (duration) is basically useless stat because of the all the condition clearing going on.

But... how did servers get to care then if alliances cant? Everyone used to be on the same boat for the foreseeable future. It's easy to plan long term this way. You care and maintain your boat because it is your boat for the foreseeable future - the people on this boat have become your friends and you rely on them and they rely on you - you make each other better because you know you're all stuck on this boat forever.However, with alliances you're on a boat that is rigged to explode after 8 weeks with a bunch of strangers.Do you care about maintaining and repairing a boat you know is going to blow up in 8 weeks?Do you care about a bunch of strangers that might be trying to kill you in the subsequent 8 week season?No alliance is going to want to help any other alliance because after each reshuffle, the alliance you helped get better might now be your enemy.Alliances will only care about themselves. Yes an alliance is only 20% of a server's population. The other 80% are randoms. No it's not up to the players. That's simplistic thinking - you're not thinking about how it works enough. Servers will now be built from a random group of alliances supplemented by a random group of non-aligned guilds supplemented even further by a random group of non-aligned pugs. A full alliance would form only 20% of that server. However, the issue is that coverage happens at a server level, not an alliance level. You literally have no idea what coverage gaps these random groups will bring to your server and yet they make 80% of your server. It doesn't matter if I perfectly balance my alliance when the perfect balance only makes up 20% of the server's population. Let's say however that I do balance my alliance perfectly - during the reshuffle I get joined with 3 alliances that couldn't give a hoot about coverage and have just stacked NA to the roof. Do you think I'm going to be engaged in seeing my server succeed when the 3 other alliances I'm paired with don't care? I won't, I'll only care about my alliance's performance - so I'll just stack my timezone to the hilt so my alliance's play time is good. Even if I did work out the coverage gaps and manage to get a new SEA guild or two into my alliance - it would all change in 8 weeks. I might have too many SEA players in my alliance the next week - do I now anger the two guilds I just recruited and kick them out? If you structure your alliance to have a medium level of SEA players and you get randomly linked to groups that have zero SEA coverage, you now have terrible coverage. If you structure your alliance to have a high level of SEA players and you get randomly linked with huge SEA coverage you now have too much coverage. So an alliance would have to predict all the future shortcomings of every partner alliance, partner guilds and pugs in order to structure themselves for appropriate coverage. It's much easier if Arenanet handles the coverage balancing in the way I specified previously.

Raymond, To say I'm concerned about the fact you aren't addressing coverage and time zones in this FAQ is an understatement. Coverage has been probably the biggest bugbear in the history of WvW - it should be at the CORE of your solution and yet it isn't mentioned here. I'm not being dramatic when I say you potentially risk killing the game for your South East Asian/Oceanic population if you do not address this. In the past we have addressed this ourselves by manually migrating to accounts where we could get SEA timezone fights. You are now removing our time zone migration controls - so your balancing algorithm MUST address this and it must address it as a priority in balancing, not as an afterthought. As there is no "server pride" anymore you can't leave this up to alliances to self-balance as most alliance leaders won't care at all what happens outside of their time zone. If a server with heavy SEA ends up playing against a server with no SEA for 8 weeks can you imagine how boring that would get and how many players would just quit the game? PvD every night is NOT fun - we'll just quit the game instead. You have to be very careful here that your solution addresses timezones/coverage as a priority. Your algorithm can easily categorise a player based on historical hours as either: "NA primary", "SEA primary", "EU primary" or "OCX primary". e.g., something like this: [sorry for pseudocode] NA_hour_count = count_hours(NA_timezone_start, NA_timezone_end, player_season_history);SEA_hour_count = count_hours(SEA_timezone_start, SEA_timezone_end, player_season_history);OCX_hour_count = count_hours(OCX_timezone_start, OCX_timezone_end, player_season_history);EU_hour_count = count_hours(EU_timezone_start, EU_timezone_end, player_season_history); PrimaryTimezone playerTZ = get_primary_timezone(NA_hour_count, SEA_hour_count, OCX_hour_count, EU_hour_count); NA_players = count_players(PrimaryTimezone.NA, guild_register);SEA_players = count_players(PrimaryTimezone.SEA, guild_register);OCX_players = count_players(PrimaryTimezone.OCX, guild_register);EU_players = count_players(PrimaryTimezone.EU, guild_register); PrimaryTimezone guildTZ = get_primary_timezone(NA_players, SEA_players, OCX_players, EU_players); Doing this calculation would enable you to classify non-aligned guilds and non-aligned players as NA, SEA, EU or OCX. I imagine your match up/balancing algorithm will have three phases: Phase 1: Selecting core alliancesPhase 2: Back filling with non-aligned guildsPhase 3: Back filling with non-aligned playersPhase 1 is too hard to balance coverage because with 500 players, you don't have the granularity. So I'm suggesting during Phase 2 and 3 where you do have granularity that you need to examine the Time Zone make up of your Phase 1 alliances and back fill with non-aligned guilds and non-aligned players from the appropriate time zones to even up the coverage. So for example let's say your system does primary allocation of 4 alliances (server A) vs 4 alliances (server B ) and then sees that server B has 50 less SEA players than server A, your algorithm can then stack in SEA guilds and SEA individuals so server B has 50 more SEA players. If it then notices server B's OCX has 15 more players it will allocate 1 small OCX guild (10 players) and 5 OCX players to server A. It doesn't have to be EXACT but it needs to be close enough so there are good fights during at least the two primary time zones (NA and SEA) and if you can balance the secondary time zones (EU/OCX) then that would be cherry on the cake. Please let us know you are aware of this issue and going to address it in your solution (so I don't have to create more threads to raise awareness).

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.

Awesome thinking. This is far better communication/engagement than we've ever had in the past.

Yes please Arenanet! I need to know where my guardian is so I can get stab.