Raymond Lukes.6305

Here are the worlds for EU: Abaddon's Mouth (DE), Dzagonur (DE)Augury Rock (FR), Arborstone (FR), Fort Ranik (FR)Baruch Bay (SP)Desolation (EN), Ring of Fire (EN)Drakkar Lake (DE), Miller's Sound (DE)Elona Reach (DE)Gandara (EN), Fissure of Woe (EN)Jade Sea (FR), Vizunah Square (FR)Kodash (DE)Piken Square (EN), Blacktide (EN)Riverside (DE)Ruins of Surmia (EN), Vabbi (EN)Seafarer's Rest (EN), Gunnar's Hold (EN)Underworld (EN), Far Shiverpeaks (EN)Whiteside Ridge (EN), Aurora Glade (EN)Here are the worlds for NA: Anvil Rock, Jade QuarryBlackgate, Ehmry BayCrystal Desert, MaguumaDragonbrand, Isle of JanthirFerguson's Crossing, Eredon TerraceFort Aspenwood, KainengHenge of Denravi, Sorrow's FurnaceNorthern Shiverpeaks, Gate of MadnessSea of Sorrows, Borlis PassStormbluff Isle, DarkhavenTarnished Coast, Devona's RestYak's Bend, Sanctum of Rall

Hey everyone,I would like to give you all a quick update about world restructuring. It has been a few months since our last update, and we are happy to let you know that progress has been good. We have overcome a few major snags and bugs and this has put a few of our big goals in sight. What am I working on?I am primarily working on World Restructuring with some of my time supporting the live game. These additional tasks include improvements for some live systems, addressing bugs and a bit of internal support for the team. I have worked on some QoL tasks such as removing participation decay outside of WvW. I hope that we soon will be able to announce some of the other things we have been working on. As I have discussed before, we are working on a live game, and so there are always a lot of moving parts. What has been happening with World Restructuring?We spent some time since the July update working on breaking down the remaining backend tasks. I have been focusing on getting those things done. Presently, many of the pieces are working on their own, though some things are still outstanding. Once I have all the parts I will begin the work of stitching it all together. I want to stress that while there has been a lot of work done, and we have made some really good and exciting progress, we are still a ways out from the launch of World Restructuring and Alliances. One of the elements that currently is functional on the backend is the concept of WvW guilds and players being able to select a WvW guild. We test this using debug commands because none of the UI is in place, but the communication layers are there as well as the storage aspects of that data. This provides us with some of the data necessary for grouping people onto teams in the matchmaker. Speaking of the matchmaker, I have completed a very basic implementation of a matchmaker that will churn through a huge list of players grouped by WvW guild and then place them on teams while keeping team sizes even. There is still a lot to do with this to get it to something that handles all the cases we want, but the early work and numbers look very promising. We are taking a pragmatic approach to building and testing various parts of World Restructuring. We are already testing some of these systems in isolation using live data and the live environment. Using this method, we have already identified bugs and race conditions that would have been difficult to track down and fix with the whole system in place. There has not been a ton of work on the player front end. We continue to focus on getting the core architecture solid so we can build the frontend on a working foundation. Once work is underway and we have something more tangible on the frontend, we can start discussing how we want to show off the new shinies to everyone. F.A.Q.What World Restructuring update would be complete without an FAQ section? Is there an update on the Alliance (World Restructuring) system?Yes, here it is! ;) Can NA and EU players join the same Alliance and play WvW together?No. The NA and EU still will be split and have their own teams. While it technically will be possible for a guild or alliance to have members in both NA and EU, the system places those players on teams in their own datacenter. Will I need to buy an Expansion to get into an alliance?No. What about non-WvW groups that use their shard to influence map instance selection outside of WvW?These players will be unaffected by this change. The system that chooses map instances does not consider shard. How does the alliance system fix anything if people still will be able to transfer?Currently, the plan is to change where we allow people to transfer, and to be more responsive to transfer restrictions for teams that are overpopulated. Some of the details of how this will work are in the original post about World Restructuring. Will time zone imbalance still be an issueIt is true that in the initial release of World Restructuring we are not planning to consider time zone distribution when creating worlds. Part of that is so we can get the primary aspects of the system in and gather data about how the system works given the metrics we are using for balance. We want to compare apples to apples to give us the clearest information. This also will allow us to have a new baseline to compare against modifications to the metrics used for balancing the teams. We also are discussing some other ways to address “off hours” play, so stay tuned for more info as we can share it. Are only WvW play hours, not all play hours, considered in the population calculation?Yes, we only use play hours in WvW when doing the population calculations. How Many Alliances can be on a team?There is not a clear answer here other than “however many there need to be.” The focus is on getting the population balanced and not specifically on limiting the number of alliances per team. Are you planning to update the API?Yes. There will need to be some updates to the API to support the new system. Beyond that, I do not have details. Is repping a guild the same as selecting it as my WvW guild?No, repping is independent from selecting your WvW guild. You still will be able to rep whatever guild you like in WvW without changing the world the system places you on. What is next? What comes after World Restructuring?Whoa now! We should not get ahead of ourselves. World Restructuring is only one of the irons we have in the fire so we are talking about things post World Restructuring. These are things we are not ready or able to discuss yet but we’ll update you when we have more things to relay.

There have been some concerns about how World Restructuring will change the ways people are matched in public maps outside of WvW. In a previous post, I alluded to the possibility of an issue here but I was mistaken. At the time, I wasn't clear about public map instance selection and how it was done. I've now done the proper discovery and nothing about how we are changing worlds with world restructuring will effect instance selection for public maps.

We are still finalizing things but we are looking at giving titles. How it will work I'm still not clear on but we want to do something that acknowledges people's worlds.

Sorry it's not really called out specifically but its here. Basically if we do some kind of round up method that will limit the number of guilds to what ever the 500 / Minimum guild size (so like if a 1 person guild is rounded up to 5 then there would be a limit of 100 guilds). If we don't round up guild limit would be 500 at one person per guild.

Thanks for the update! I'd humbly suggest working on the front-end for alliances and implementing them ahead of time before the matchmaking gets in place, so that it allows us to learn that system (and debug it) before it can impact the world-building. If that's at all possible.Alliance chat might be paramount, so i'd personally like to see that implemented prior to the release of the system. We fully intend to give a significant lead time with the frontend in place and people able to setup WvW guilds and alliances before the matchmaker does it's thing for the first time.

Ideally you can find a guild that has a similar play style and approach to WvW that you do and join them. That way you have a group that plays like you'd like.

A total play time or rather the last week play time? The play time calculation will take into consideration the historic play time of the play. I'm not going to go into details on how that calculation is done.

Yes WvW play time

July 2018 UpdateI have been meaning to give everyone a World Restructuring update for a while now and I finally have a bit of down time to spend doing just that. Back in January, we posted a tentative design that would balance world populations and allow for continued balancing as time goes on. Since that post, we have reviewed a lot of community feedback in many forms (Gw2 Official Forum discussions, Reddit, in game interactions, etc.) and have started moving forward with that system. As we stated in the original document, this large task requires work from multiple disciplines and is going to take some time to fully complete. Add to that live game support and, as you can guess, our task lists are full. When?At this time, we do not have a date to share with the community but we are actively working toward internal milestones. We plan to post periodic updates when we have interesting or relevant information to share. Where are they now?We currently have in place some of the backend systems that will track, store, and handle changes to the alliance structure of guilds. The current iteration does not include front-end systems or UI for creating, joining, or otherwise dealing with alliances. However, it gives us some structure and the ability to start field-testing how alliances/WvW guilds would look. From here, we can run simulations and get a sense for how the system might function under load. What is next?The next major things to develop are the front-end systems and the back-end matchmaking. The front-end takes time and iteration, and the matchmaking itself is sort of the whole point and needs to be undertaken with care, since it involves assigning every WvW player to a new world all at once! Why is this taking so long?This project is not small in scale. As we said when we began, we are changing and adding a bunch of major systems with this change. We are moving along at a pace that tracks with our goals but, as is the nature of our jobs, things can come up involving either unforeseen complications with the World Restructuring system or issues with the live game that need to be addressed first. Updates, Clarifications and FAQWhat makes up a world?We will build a world from any number of Alliances, Guilds, and Solo Players. This means a single alliance will not necessarily dominate the population of a world. The goal is to create even worlds, so the matchmaker builds the worlds out of whatever pieces makes sense to fulfill that goal. Will you build hard-core and casual worlds?No. The goal is to balance worlds by population. The matchmaker, at this time, is unconcerned with trying to match skill. Alliance sizeWe are currently leaning toward alliance size being 500. This is technically easier, as we already support groups of this size (guilds), and it gives us more flexibility to make the worlds even. Minimum Guild SizeThe original plan was to count a guild within the alliance at some rounded-up size rather than exact size when calculating how full an alliance was. The benefit of this method was it would give more autonomy to the individual guilds to control WvW members, i.e., recruit new members or if current guild members decide they want to start playing WvW. Rewards/Tournaments/LeaderboardsIf—and that is a big if—we do add/change rewards to be tied more directly to World success in matches, those changes would come later. The plan is to ship the core system and get all the kinks worked out and the teams balanced before we start trying to find new ways to give rewards or do tournaments or anything of that kind. Player Play HoursIn the original post and discussion, we talked about using player hours (the current method we use for calculating world sizes for links and “full” status) and then adjusting those hours by other metrics like command hours, etc. We subsequently have decided to, at least at the start, use only play hours and not adjust using other metrics. This will allow us to compare apples to apples so to speak once the system is in place. From there we can simulate how certain adjustments would change the matchups. This will make it easier to determine if an adjustment will have a positive impact. Alliance Tags on the Name PlateAs of right now, changes to the nameplate that add an Alliance Tag is in the “Would Like to Have” column. How is the alliance system going to affect queues?It depends on where you normally play. If you are used to playing on a large world then I imagine the queue times will seem better. If you are used to playing on a smaller world then the queue times may seem to increase somewhat. This also is dependent on how big we let the worlds get. We can potentially adjust the number of worlds to help with this. Alliance ChatThis is something we have on our list. With the exception of a technical limitation that prevents us from doing it this, we believe it should be something that gets in eventually.

The members need to mark one of their current guilds as WvW guild every 2 months to get counted towards alliance slot for that particular matching. Members that dont mark the guild as the one they chose to go with to a new world, dont count. There is no plan to make this an active thing you need to keep setting. Once it's set you wont have to set it again unless something happens to unset it (you leave the guild etc).