Very good vid, glad they’re giving wvw some love the little adjustments go pretty far in this game mode not to mention the big changes like the scoring system.
As a USTZ player who moved temporarily to Japan I think this update misses the point. Sure there are fewer players but the implication is that it is *easier* to make points off hours than during prime and that just is **not true**. Is a 5v5 easier or harder than a 30v30? No. its just different. Arguably, I have fewer enemies to rally from so it may actually be **harder** and yet my efforts are now valued much less. What ArenaNet *should* be doing is weighting skirmish score by how much population you have online at any time, so that if you outnumber people your contributions are worth less. That solves the same problem by reducing the prominence of big off hours blobs where its easier to generate those big population imbalances.
@@Synaps4 it stops one server from making a zerg at the start of off hours, dominate the entire map and winning every skirmish till Morning matter so much. But that also gives the other 2 teams of roamers something to do. Its a very hard thing to balance, I don't agree with it completely either, but I'm happy they're trying something.
Good video. The score changes are nice... Except nobody cares about scores. Even if they introduce rewards, those will be so minimal , nobody still will care about score.
Hi sheff ! I like your wvw content like always! I like the format you are using. Short topic between different video can be a good concept! Since you cover upcoming change in overall in this video as well, maybe you can add it to your little!
Hello! Good to see you. I think the short-form discussion is a format that not many other people do, so I'm glad that you appreciate it. I'm really excited to finish up a couple big real life milestones and get back to doing more regular videos. I've got a lot of ideas, just need some time now. :)
Hey Sheff, You state that an objective will be contested if "A gate or a wall is damaged to 98% or less". When the Update Preview Notes state "Objectives contest [...] when a gate/wall is damaged below 98%". I don't believe damaging a wall or gate to 98% will contest the objective. It must be damaged to 97% or less based on the Update Preview Notes. Cheers, Serial
I've played both during prime time and off hours (on both NA and EU) and I'm liking the new system because it was always a hassle when we wanted to go up a tier and you'd have to PPT all day and all night just to try and catch up to the off hour night/very early morning crews even though you'd never see them during prime time or even prime adjacent times. I think it generally makes it easier for most players to not get burnt out - but here I also understand that some will miss their off hour influence so ymmv. I'm also hoping that the PPT/PPK changes will be favorable to finding good matchups. I'm liking the contesting changes, but not sure about the EWP change yet haha. Overall I'm very curious about the patch and upcoming changes! Thank you for this good overview video! Looking forward to your reaction when it's all implemented :D
So if you play midnight or later your efforts will be roughly equal to a third of the prime time players. I see this making the off hours become very dead.
That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is, if you play NA prime right now, your efforts are roughly equal to a third of an off-hours player. The goal is to find a solution that makes a player's contributions equal regardless of when you choose to play.
@@sheffplaysgames How does one get equal contribution regardless of when they play if the scoring system is deliberately cutting off points for people playing non primetime?
@@sheffplaysgames I guess it will be a we will see situation but all this is saying that the points will matter in a big way in the future. If it stays the same then I doudt this will make any difference.
@@naruluwalker132 , I agree. Late-night guilds are gonna stop playing cuz they feel like they don't matter. They're going to look at the score and think, "So what?" and quit. Prime-time guilds very rarely care about score. They just zerg around stomping on people and log off when their time is up.
@@naruluwalker132 It's equal per-player. In the old system, me and 500 of my friends and enemies all battling generated 5 VP, while 40 people playing at 4am generated the same amount of VP. This resulted in tiers where servers with coverage went up, and servers with no coverage went down. With the change, VP is now tied to activity, which means that servers with high activity go up, and servers with low activity go down. It's changing the tier movement to be about individual players and their groups, rather than the performance of the entire team overall. At least, that's my take.
As a casual SEA player, my guild and I don't care about the war score. We just want content that isnt on sided steam-rolling. What I fear is that this causes their algorithm to misrepresent dominant SEA/OCX guilds. Hopefully, this can help them identify which matchups actually have dominant SEA/OCX groups to properly pair them during the next match reset
I think ArenaNet definitely has some issues with matchmaking for OCX in particular now, and it'll be interesting to see what they come up with as a solution.
I have noted as an ocx player, this new system has been an absolute nightmare, a handful of people on green and blue with a server Q blob on red. Has been this way every week so far, beyond a joke. Ocx was already a wasteland for many servers pre changes, but atleast you used to know what content there could be based on the server...... Now, who tf knows... And by the time you get an idea, it will all be blown apart again. Myself and quite a few roamers i know are pretty much at the door of quitting back to spvp (another barren waste with 7+min q times) sad
The scoring annoys me a little as an ocx/sea player. My guild won't bring in much at all, and if the game makes war score matter more and more then I'll feel like I'm missing out on good points and my guild will have to play on what we'd consider off hours in order to really help the server.
It's been something like 38 days between the last video and this one -- I hope you have some alternative sources for great days, and aren't waiting on me specifically for all of them. :)
True and actionable. Putting text on screen makes me worried that the videos will start to come across as a slide deck, but I think I can restrain myself.
Competitive game mode, all these changes make sense. Weighting points based off activity makes a lot more sense. (For reference i play in OCX) With it mattering less to PPT during off hours I'm also hopeful it will break up some of the stacking in this timezone. Currently its like 3 MASSIVE groups and everyone else has singles.
You probably don't know this but on weekends I play during EU time which is like noon for NA, I have been doing this for the entire of rall's rest and honestly it's one of the contributions for pushing us up to tier 1, Low tiers there was nothing during that timezone but as we went up we started seeing other groups. Like right now in T1
PPT time gating is a mixed bag. It's going to filter the heavy na prime time groups together and the ocx time groups together, which I think is good. However, the issue with that is the delusional "tier" system. You can't add rewards for a higher tier when they're only there because anet wiped their ass. Need to keep in mind that anet makes the groups.
There was actually a ton of stuff wrong in here -- it had the game flagged as World of Warcraft as well for some reason. I still haven't figured out why the chapter markers are broken, but I'll keep poking it.
Scoring changes are bad. I was running with a late-night guild last night and they're angry and frustrated that their contributions will mean less. (One guy literally said "We don't matter.") This is just promoting prime-time zergs, who apparently have the loudest voice in Anet's ear. I actually think the scoring system should be the OPPOSITE of what they've proposed. Give bonuses to the few players that play before/after peak hours to encourage off-hours playing. Prime time is zergs running around tromping on each other; off-hours is smaller groups doing PPT to even the score. It's called teamwork.
Also, if fight guilds just want to stand in a field and compare sword sizes with the enemy, then Anet should make a separate competitive mode for them.
Like I said in another comment, you can also look at it the other way -- NA prime's contributions have meant less than OCX's have for years. A lot of the "scoring doesn't matter" discourse comes from those NA groups, because the impact that multiple 50-man zergs have on the warscore in the 10pm eastern skirmish is exactly the same as multiple 5-man havoc groups back-capping objectives in the 6am eastern slot. If anything, the impact of the zergs is even lower, because they have to spend most of their time fighting each other inside of contested objectives, and PPK has historically contributed less to score than PPT has.
They could, but you can take that same argument and apply it to PPT groups. If backcappers just want to farm karma and world XP from objectives, they have Drizzlewood available to them. I think any approach to the scoring conversations that involves telling any group to go do something else is unnecessarily reductive. There's no "correct" way to play World vs. World, there's just historically been ways to play World vs. World that the scoring system has heavily favored, and now that they are being changed, it feels like things are being taken away from the groups that benefited.
' promoting prime-time zergs' you mean the bulk of the playerbase? You'll still be able to run around during off hours and PPT, but the fact its non contested is reflected now. In reality this will change very little for you though, you can still PPT in off hours, but it won't boost your server into high tiers (which isn't fair on your NA Prime grouping.)
You cant encourage people to play off-hours. OCX and SEA have less people in than the Americas. This is a population issue. People have work and lives and cant log in at 6am for OCX prime time and 9am for SEA prime time. You shouldnt be rewarding a small percentage of people over everyone else. This is total backwards thinking.
Using JQ as an example: OCX/SEA heavy. NA pretty much dead. The guest server even has better NA player count most of the time. NA guilds were getting stomped due to map coverage and player count during prime time. JQ SEA/OCX is the opposite. Huge population, no enemies. Both timezones were barely getting fights reasonable for their size. While I don't like the old scoring system either, this upcoming change is only beneficial to NA exclusively. This will reflect into NA getting better matchups but it disregards the SEA/OCX population. This is anet telling non NA/EU players "go fuck yourself" if you're not a primetime timezone player. Tl;dr - before, both timezones were fucked. Now, only off hours players are left to rot. Is this really the way to go?
![Oasis - Oasis Live '25 [Official Trailer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/gol_JnuEtKM/mqdefault.jpg)
Very good vid, glad they’re giving wvw some love the little adjustments go pretty far in this game mode not to mention the big changes like the scoring system.
As a USTZ player who moved temporarily to Japan I think this update misses the point. Sure there are fewer players but the implication is that it is *easier* to make points off hours than during prime and that just is **not true**. Is a 5v5 easier or harder than a 30v30? No. its just different. Arguably, I have fewer enemies to rally from so it may actually be **harder** and yet my efforts are now valued much less. What ArenaNet *should* be doing is weighting skirmish score by how much population you have online at any time, so that if you outnumber people your contributions are worth less. That solves the same problem by reducing the prominence of big off hours blobs where its easier to generate those big population imbalances.
@@Synaps4 it stops one server from making a zerg at the start of off hours, dominate the entire map and winning every skirmish till Morning matter so much. But that also gives the other 2 teams of roamers something to do. Its a very hard thing to balance, I don't agree with it completely either, but I'm happy they're trying something.
Thanks for the new recipe chef John!
Good video. The score changes are nice... Except nobody cares about scores. Even if they introduce rewards, those will be so minimal , nobody still will care about score.
Hi sheff !
I like your wvw content like always!
I like the format you are using. Short topic between different video can be a good concept!
Since you cover upcoming change in overall in this video as well, maybe you can add it to your little!
Hello! Good to see you. I think the short-form discussion is a format that not many other people do, so I'm glad that you appreciate it. I'm really excited to finish up a couple big real life milestones and get back to doing more regular videos. I've got a lot of ideas, just need some time now. :)
Hey Sheff,
You state that an objective will be contested if "A gate or a wall is damaged to 98% or less". When the Update Preview Notes state "Objectives contest [...] when a gate/wall is damaged below 98%".
I don't believe damaging a wall or gate to 98% will contest the objective. It must be damaged to 97% or less based on the Update Preview Notes.
Cheers,
Serial
I've played both during prime time and off hours (on both NA and EU) and I'm liking the new system because it was always a hassle when we wanted to go up a tier and you'd have to PPT all day and all night just to try and catch up to the off hour night/very early morning crews even though you'd never see them during prime time or even prime adjacent times. I think it generally makes it easier for most players to not get burnt out - but here I also understand that some will miss their off hour influence so ymmv.
I'm also hoping that the PPT/PPK changes will be favorable to finding good matchups. I'm liking the contesting changes, but not sure about the EWP change yet haha.
Overall I'm very curious about the patch and upcoming changes!
Thank you for this good overview video! Looking forward to your reaction when it's all implemented :D
So if you play midnight or later your efforts will be roughly equal to a third of the prime time players. I see this making the off hours become very dead.
That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is, if you play NA prime right now, your efforts are roughly equal to a third of an off-hours player. The goal is to find a solution that makes a player's contributions equal regardless of when you choose to play.
@@sheffplaysgames How does one get equal contribution regardless of when they play if the scoring system is deliberately cutting off points for people playing non primetime?
@@sheffplaysgames I guess it will be a we will see situation but all this is saying that the points will matter in a big way in the future. If it stays the same then I doudt this will make any difference.
@@naruluwalker132 , I agree. Late-night guilds are gonna stop playing cuz they feel like they don't matter. They're going to look at the score and think, "So what?" and quit.
Prime-time guilds very rarely care about score. They just zerg around stomping on people and log off when their time is up.
@@naruluwalker132 It's equal per-player. In the old system, me and 500 of my friends and enemies all battling generated 5 VP, while 40 people playing at 4am generated the same amount of VP. This resulted in tiers where servers with coverage went up, and servers with no coverage went down.
With the change, VP is now tied to activity, which means that servers with high activity go up, and servers with low activity go down. It's changing the tier movement to be about individual players and their groups, rather than the performance of the entire team overall. At least, that's my take.
As a casual SEA player, my guild and I don't care about the war score. We just want content that isnt on sided steam-rolling.
What I fear is that this causes their algorithm to misrepresent dominant SEA/OCX guilds.
Hopefully, this can help them identify which matchups actually have dominant SEA/OCX groups to properly pair them during the next match reset
I think ArenaNet definitely has some issues with matchmaking for OCX in particular now, and it'll be interesting to see what they come up with as a solution.
@sheffplaysgames definitely. There are not many players, but there are some serious guilds there, so that's gonna ruffle some feathers
I like the time thing. It will balance out the fact that there are people in Australia playing on NA servers, Which throws shi off.
I have noted as an ocx player, this new system has been an absolute nightmare, a handful of people on green and blue with a server Q blob on red. Has been this way every week so far, beyond a joke. Ocx was already a wasteland for many servers pre changes, but atleast you used to know what content there could be based on the server...... Now, who tf knows... And by the time you get an idea, it will all be blown apart again. Myself and quite a few roamers i know are pretty much at the door of quitting back to spvp (another barren waste with 7+min q times) sad
Great GvG footage in the background!
The scoring annoys me a little as an ocx/sea player. My guild won't bring in much at all, and if the game makes war score matter more and more then I'll feel like I'm missing out on good points and my guild will have to play on what we'd consider off hours in order to really help the server.
another sheff video, another great day
It's been something like 38 days between the last video and this one -- I hope you have some alternative sources for great days, and aren't waiting on me specifically for all of them. :)
Great video and script, but it might be helpful to put some occasional bullets on the screen to highlight your points instead of just raid footage.
True and actionable. Putting text on screen makes me worried that the videos will start to come across as a slide deck, but I think I can restrain myself.
Competitive game mode, all these changes make sense. Weighting points based off activity makes a lot more sense. (For reference i play in OCX) With it mattering less to PPT during off hours I'm also hopeful it will break up some of the stacking in this timezone.
Currently its like 3 MASSIVE groups and everyone else has singles.
a Question I still have not seen answered: what do we get for winning? What happens when you win a skirmish? What are the rewards?
It's answered in the video! Check the timestamps in the description.
@@sheffplaysgames awesome thank you. i think i just missed it. watching it again!!
You probably don't know this but on weekends I play during EU time which is like noon for NA, I have been doing this for the entire of rall's rest and honestly it's one of the contributions for pushing us up to tier 1, Low tiers there was nothing during that timezone but as we went up we started seeing other groups. Like right now in T1
I know everything -- especially things that you ping to your Discord that I'm in, when you tag up for lunchtime runs.
@@sheffplaysgames wow you see the pings but don’t join smh
@@azureavocado8463 I'm rarely free during EU hours, unfortunately.
PPT time gating is a mixed bag. It's going to filter the heavy na prime time groups together and the ocx time groups together, which I think is good. However, the issue with that is the delusional "tier" system. You can't add rewards for a higher tier when they're only there because anet wiped their ass. Need to keep in mind that anet makes the groups.
I'm hopeful that the tier system gets thrown out when rewards come around. I think something like a Swiss would be really, really fun.
Metroid prime music 👍
Good jorb step mum, just have to work on your about face movement for those b rolls 👍
This system is mising slightly difrent weighting for weekends ;(
That's a good point -- it is a system that they plan on iterating on, and weekend activity may be quite different.
The chapters are all just professions instead of what the chapters are actually talking about.
Accidentally copy pasted from another video?
Uh. Yes, that sounds like my template for the description, but I swear that I updated them. Lemme go check.
There was actually a ton of stuff wrong in here -- it had the game flagged as World of Warcraft as well for some reason. I still haven't figured out why the chapter markers are broken, but I'll keep poking it.
Scoring changes are bad. I was running with a late-night guild last night and they're angry and frustrated that their contributions will mean less. (One guy literally said "We don't matter.") This is just promoting prime-time zergs, who apparently have the loudest voice in Anet's ear.
I actually think the scoring system should be the OPPOSITE of what they've proposed. Give bonuses to the few players that play before/after peak hours to encourage off-hours playing. Prime time is zergs running around tromping on each other; off-hours is smaller groups doing PPT to even the score. It's called teamwork.
Also, if fight guilds just want to stand in a field and compare sword sizes with the enemy, then Anet should make a separate competitive mode for them.
Like I said in another comment, you can also look at it the other way -- NA prime's contributions have meant less than OCX's have for years. A lot of the "scoring doesn't matter" discourse comes from those NA groups, because the impact that multiple 50-man zergs have on the warscore in the 10pm eastern skirmish is exactly the same as multiple 5-man havoc groups back-capping objectives in the 6am eastern slot. If anything, the impact of the zergs is even lower, because they have to spend most of their time fighting each other inside of contested objectives, and PPK has historically contributed less to score than PPT has.
They could, but you can take that same argument and apply it to PPT groups. If backcappers just want to farm karma and world XP from objectives, they have Drizzlewood available to them. I think any approach to the scoring conversations that involves telling any group to go do something else is unnecessarily reductive. There's no "correct" way to play World vs. World, there's just historically been ways to play World vs. World that the scoring system has heavily favored, and now that they are being changed, it feels like things are being taken away from the groups that benefited.
' promoting prime-time zergs' you mean the bulk of the playerbase?
You'll still be able to run around during off hours and PPT, but the fact its non contested is reflected now. In reality this will change very little for you though, you can still PPT in off hours, but it won't boost your server into high tiers (which isn't fair on your NA Prime grouping.)
You cant encourage people to play off-hours. OCX and SEA have less people in than the Americas. This is a population issue. People have work and lives and cant log in at 6am for OCX prime time and 9am for SEA prime time. You shouldnt be rewarding a small percentage of people over everyone else. This is total backwards thinking.
Rallguuma
Using JQ as an example: OCX/SEA heavy. NA pretty much dead. The guest server even has better NA player count most of the time.
NA guilds were getting stomped due to map coverage and player count during prime time. JQ SEA/OCX is the opposite. Huge population, no enemies.
Both timezones were barely getting fights reasonable for their size.
While I don't like the old scoring system either, this upcoming change is only beneficial to NA exclusively. This will reflect into NA getting better matchups but it disregards the SEA/OCX population.
This is anet telling non NA/EU players "go fuck yourself" if you're not a primetime timezone player.
Tl;dr - before, both timezones were fucked. Now, only off hours players are left to rot. Is this really the way to go?