Collaborative Development: World Population

#1 - Oct. 28, 2013, 12:42 p.m.

Hi All,

We are now moving to the discussion phase of this initiative. The topic with the most votes in this area of the game was World Population Imbalance(Note: The topic tally was aggregated across all Community Forums per supported languages). The Coordinators for this thread will be Devon Carver.

As discussed here: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/Collaborative-Development/

First I would to lay down some rules for as we move forward regarding how we collaborate with one another:

1: This initiative is all about discussion.

2: We will not be disclosing information pertaining to what is currently in development.

3: Anger and emotion will have less impact than intelligent discussion.

4: Together we will share and evolve design philosophies which will impact how we develop the game moving forward.

5: Aggression and disrespect to a fellow community member or developer will not be tolerated, and in the extreme could lead to the shutting down of the initiative.

6: The teams primary focus is work toward the development of GW2 and therefore posting of discussion and commentary may not be as frequent as you like. Please do understand that the initiative is taken very seriously by us all and that we will be reading the discussions and joining in as often as it is possible to do so.

We will be closing the thread on Monday November 4th, and shortly after we will have an open discussion about what worked and what did not in regard to the process of the first topic discussion.

Until then thank for taking the time to take part in this and I look forward to discussing the game with you.

ChrisW

P.S: it is likely that we will watch the discussion for a few days before posting.

#346 - Oct. 30, 2013, 6:32 p.m.

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to provide a little direction here to the discussion. Firstly I want to reiterate Chris’ point in the original post: “2: We will not be disclosing information pertaining to what is currently in development.” I think there are a lot of really intriguing ideas to be found in this thread, but it’s not the purpose of this space for us to discuss what we are or aren’t doing to address the issue. More broadly speaking I wanted to clarify the types of things we take into consideration when we make large changes to WvW. One of the most important aspects of Guild Wars 2 is the spirit of collaboration that we want to foster between players. It’s a core principle behind the event system, the skills in the game, the way we created gathering nodes, etc. Simply put, if a change will cause players to be less inclined to playing with other players, we won’t make it. Changes to WvW that incentivize players to avoid others on the map or that create incentives to have a smaller general population on the map create just that problem. When we look to make changes to WvW we look towards encouraging players to play together, finding ways to empower groups of skilled players to be able to make their mark even against superior numbers, etc. Solutions to the population imbalance would absolutely have to take that into account.

In addition, we don’t release specific numbers in terms of populations, queues, etc. and I can’t comment directly on those statistics. I’d be more curious to know what people think is the reason behind the fact that score is so directly related to the number of people on a server 24/7 and how WvW could be designed differently to address that moving forward. My personal observation is that the momentum you gain from even a small period of having more people online is so large that it can’t be overcome. Which makes me think we need to be doing more to slow that momentum.

Again, this is intended to be a discussion about the design principles, and not a forum for requests for information about current projects or to request specific changes.

Thanks again for the discussion, I hope it continues to progress positively.

#358 - Oct. 30, 2013, 7:28 p.m.

ferra.9867:

I still think that 24h coverage is the main issue and the solution is to merge american and european servers, so we should have more 24h coverage servers and more fun matchups, at least the golden league servers must have all a 24h coverage.

While an interesting idea, merging EU and NA servers is a technical impossibility. They have to remain separated.

#361 - Oct. 30, 2013, 7:33 p.m.

akanibbles.6237:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

IDEA: auto teamups of the two trailing teams

When leading team score > (2nd + 3rd) / modifier then 2nd and 3rd become automatically allied and/or gain bonuses for attacking the leading team.

I like this idea. Too often the 3rd place team drops off and has no effect on the game other than to stop the 2nd place team be competitive to the 1st place team.

This is an intriguing concept. The original idea behind WvW was that this would happen of its own accord, but I haven’t seen that in practice. I think it could be much more of a part of the game if there were a way to do this. Would it make more sense to provide increased score from this or to increase the individual rewards? I would lean slightly towards the latter. I also wonder if it would work to be really heavy handed about it and actually put the two losing servers on the same team. Of course, that presents numerous problems including score tracking at that juncture. But I would think we can find some sort of system that encourages servers to work together to defeat a bigger server.

#365 - Oct. 30, 2013, 7:43 p.m.

Madam Pomfrey.4162:

You want to know why? Really? I mean you really expect an answer to that? And suggestions on how to address that have been already provided, but will probably be ignored cause things are already in development anyway.

The way that we try and find answers to the types of problems raised in this thread are by trying to get to the heart of the issue. Saying things like “populations aren’t balanced” doesn’t lead to any productive solutions because they all involve things like drastically redistributing the populations of the game. Finding the core reasons for that like “score momentum is overpowering” allow us to attack the actual problem. What I hope to get out of this is a sense of why people think that the population causes the scoring issues, because that is something we can find a solution to. As part of that it’s important for us to more clearly explain why we’ve made some of the decisions we have made so that we talk about the reasoning behind those and how they’ve been in practice.

These threads are intended to be a discussion about the design of various aspects of the game and how the team and the players view them. Our decision making in terms of what actions we take and what we are already doing have to take a wide range of things into account including available resources. So it was never my intent to imply that we would jump to do the things mentioned in this thread because some aren’t feasible, some require resources we don’t have, and some might already be in progress.

#366 - Oct. 30, 2013, 7:47 p.m.

ViRiD.2784:

The most obvious solution to me is a timezone-bridging capstone event somewhere on the order occurring every 12 hours that acts as a primary accumulator of points in WvW, and uses the number of controlled nodes as a multiplier for the number of points rewarded such that winning it and denying other servers it is the single most important thing to victory.

As it stands, ticking every 12 minutes for points leaves the mode subject to the most subtle of population fluctuations. Constant 24/7 activity is far too necessary, and the point system would be my first consideration for relieving that.

That’s certainly a different direction. My concern here would be that we put too much emphasis on a very specific time of day. It might be the case that we should try and put more emphasis on specific portions of the day, but the more focused it is, the more you encourage everyone to show up at exactly the same time, which makes the queue worse and just lessens the experience for everyone. I think there is something to the idea of PPT being higher during certain times of day, but it has sort of the opposite problem. That’s the balance we haven’t yet struck, in my opinion.

#686 - Nov. 4, 2013, 1:21 p.m.

Keep in mind that weekends are a thing. Now that we’re all back in the office, caffeinated and ready to go, we’re gonna jump back in the threads.

Having said that, when you guys get going and are having good discussions, we sit back and make sure we give you guys room to debate/discuss. Just because there isn’t a dev response every X posts, it doesn’t mean we’re not watching the thread.

#689 - Nov. 4, 2013, 1:44 p.m.

Sure, those devs are free to post on the weekend if they want to!

Keep in mind that some devs have families, or may have prior obligations/plans on a weekend, while some other devs may have a lot of free time on a given weekend!

#714 - Nov. 4, 2013, 5:26 p.m.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to chime in again and say that the discussion around population imbalance and WvW has been really wide-open and interesting. There are some definite things we’ve learned from reading your responses and some really interesting ideas in here as well. The goal of this initiative is to foster discussion about the game and for that discussion to help us make better design decisions in the future. I think there have been some good points raised in this thread and I’ve definitely seen some new ways of looking at the problem. This particular issue is very thorny, which makes it a bit more difficult to wade into the conversation. Population affects so many other areas that it makes it complicated to untangle it and get actionable ideas. We believe that between the studio and the community we can find new ways of looking at the problems that can lead us to great solutions, and we appreciate your taking the time and energy to share your thoughts. Hopefully we can all take WvW and Guild Wars 2 further by being able to work some of these problems out together.

I wanted to further discuss a couple of ideas. Firstly, several posts have called for reduced map caps in WvW. The problem that would create is that we’d be allowing even fewer people to play in a given period of time if we were to do that. So I wonder if there is another way to accomplish the same goal, while not disenfranchising people who would now be unable to get into the maps? It’s a hard problem because the more populated servers face long queues while the less populated ones face empty maps. From my perspective there aren’t a ton of good options, which is why discussing this problem is pretty important.

Secondly, there has been some amount of discussion about the nature of server transfers and how that affects population. I think there is some space for us to make changes there, but there is always going to be a tradeoff. For example, what if we restricted or completely eliminated transfers during a season? I think it has some positives, but it might be overly damaging to people who aren’t intending to bandwagon, but legitimately want to change servers. It may be the case, though, that that number is so small that it is worth the cost. Or, what if we prevented people from transferring to the higher population servers, but not all of them? Again, it runs the risk of being a burden on some number of folks, but it may be worth the cost.

Again, this is a good discussion, it’s really important to consider the costs to any action and to remember that our goal is to do the best thing for as many of our players as possible.

#731 - Nov. 4, 2013, 8:03 p.m.

Nickface.5984:

I’m not saying it’s a good idea, mind you. Just a random thought.

Nods, it’s something we’ve talked about internally.

A lot of times, we’ll preface ideas with, “I’m not saying this is a great idea, or something we’d do, but I’ll throw it out to see if it sparks a brainstorm for anyone else…<insert idea>.”

These types of ideas (and this whole thread) are still amazing for generating ideas. Even if an idea might have a lot of problems with it, still toss it out! Maybe it’ll lead us to the eventual answer!

#849 - Nov. 6, 2013, 6:44 p.m.

So, if prices for server transfers were based on WvW population, what would a fair distribution of costs look like from the lowest population servers to the highest? Keep in mind that making it completely impossible to transfer to a server puts a burden on other players. That doesn’t mean that you couldn’t have an incredibly high price, just that completely blocked isn’t an option.

#920 - Nov. 7, 2013, 11:29 a.m.

Sticking to the lines of transfers, what are reasonable restrictions to place on players after they transfer? No WvW for the rest of the match? No WvW for 24 hours? Would that help any or would it actually exacerbate the problem?

#961 - Nov. 7, 2013, 3:06 p.m.

titanlectro.5029:

I promise you that Devon is looking at all of these metrics and measurements you are theorizing RIGHT NOW, he just doesn’t share them with you.

This is literally true. We don’t share those numbers as a company policy, but we have them and I am looking at them right now.

#1017 - Nov. 8, 2013, 12:29 p.m.

Ebisun.9682:

Zero impact in my opinion. The ppl would transfer on the last day and no problem. But what is the point to punish someone after a transfer? in theory, transfer to a lower server is not anything bad. I think is better to try to encourage ppl to make transfer to less populated servers.

The point is not necessarily to punish people, but more to add an increased cost to transferring. If you are switching worlds to be a spy or because you are bandwagoning, it makes a difference if you can’t play WvW after doing so for some period of time. It may not be worth doing, I was just curious what people thought.

#1135 - Nov. 12, 2013, 2:54 p.m.

Hey all, I’m locking this, a bit late. I’ll be posting a summary shortly as well. Thanks for all your input and your feedback. We really appreciate it!