Worlds at War, and Realms

So by now, i'm sure pretty much everyone has had a chance to see WaW in action. Maybe some of you have even had the chance to get obliterated in the Underworld (or to a lesser extent, the Fissure of Woe.) However, i've been seeing behavior related to it that is.. well, uncalled for to say the least. I'm sure there are plenty of us that anticipated seeing it... but for the sake of providing community feedback, allow me to propose a poll.

Should Worlds at War be kept with 'real world' Realms .. IE, America, Europe, Korea, etc. - or should the Realms be named after areas that exist within Tyria? Ascalon, Kryta, etc.

Good idea, I'm all for it--but I'm not sure how much it would change this whole xenophobic "trend" that's sprung up.

I think that's a cool idea but like the poster above me hinted upon, it may not stop the xenophobic tendencies because people will begin to figure out "Tyria = America! DAMN AMERIKKANS!" I think one of the main reasons we are seeing blatant racism is that Guild Wars is the first online game for many people and they do not know how to handle themselves in semi-anonymous enviornment. Needless to say, I highly doubt you will see any of that among any serious guilds / players, and that's probably the type of people you'll be associating with anyways. Ok, I've rambled a bit too much. Good idea!

-Virt

Bad thing about having "America" and "Europe" is the time zone difference. By the time one country is going to bed, the other is going to war.

You mean so that only the names change, like Ascalon for Amerika and Kryta for Europe?
If yes, then it will stay the same as it is, if not then you throw away the (IMO) maint point behind all this - less lag.

It's certainly true that for some people who are intent on being jerks, it isn't going to stop them if you just change the names around .. but the hope here is that, if it isn't in your face like "Hey! Korea just beat you!" then people who might have been swayed either way won't say anything.

I know there are connection issues at hand here, but i'd rather that those weren't a factor being taken into consideration for this Realms business. Guild Wars is built fundamentally on this concept of cooperative gameplay .. and when you change the focus from "I want to win" to "I want to beat them" .. then I think it starts to undermine itself, because now there's entire parts of the world that you're looking at as "the enemy" .. rather than just someone to enjoy gaming/competition with.

Bah, I've heard american teams are teaming up to beat single european teams and vice versa in the Tombs, so the larger ally won't give the smaller one a chance. Surely this can't have been what the designers wanted to happen?

My suggestion isn't really to change from real world names -- I think it's sort of interesting, but instead of showing the nations/continents (why is "Korea" called "Korea" and not "Asia"? Europe and America are continents) at the start of each Tombs tournament match, show only the RESULTS post-match. So after you've won, you know who you beat. Like the "mission completed" thing in PvE, but instead a "competition completed" where the guild/team names, geographical locations, and flags are shown.

That way, in the Hall of Heroes, you won't have these situations with 24 americans beating the life out of 8 europeans, 24 asians beating the crap out of 8 americans, etc. Of course, korean letters are a bit of a give-away but the teams can be mixed, and asians would have a chance to cover that part up themselves by picking other names. It would at least not be nearly as bad as it is now where GW *tells* you at the start of the game that "OK, so there are three american teams fighting a european team here, let the games begin!" and then the ugly side of nationalism shines through.

I don't want to play tournament games where the outcome is basically decided when you enter the battle by two things: nationalism and a random match making mechanism.

I think one of the problems is that we now get very little interaction with players from other continents, barring the pvp games.

We can’t visit or switch realms, and the people who go into the international districts are usually just international guilds forming a guild party.

So now we hardly ever trade, talk or do co-operative missions with gamers from other continents, the people from the ‘other side’ are now just people making us wait so damn long in the Temple of Ages.

I'm not getting the specifics behind the "less lag" reasoning behind WaW. I can see how this would help in PvE missions, as it means everyone in the group can run off a single datacenter. But in tombs (the primary battlegrounds for WaW), You're playing teams from the other worlds anyway. How is lag reduced by having 8 europeans vs 8 americans,as opposed to 2 mixed teams?. You've got to transfer the same number of packets between the two datacenters as if you had 2 mixed teams. I don't work much with netcode though, so maybe they're doing something spectacularly tricky, but I doubt it.

I'd love to see WaW be based within the actual world. It makes a whole thing a lot more freeform, and a more divorced from the real world. Who wants a constant reminder of geographical boundaries while you're in a fantasy role playing game? Having everything confined to ingame gives the devs a whole heap of gameplay options as well, while the current system seems very rigid.

Good point, the lag isn't reduced for tombs. But it's reduced for PvE, arenas and GvG between the same world...and all this is a large part of GW.

The other thing (besides (partialy) reducing lag) is to evenly distibute the server load between all data centers.

(this all is just guessing, I have no insider info)



I agree with this, it would be a much better expirience.

Did this happen a lot in the tomb? I don't think that I have seen this happening at all when I was playing. But if it is true then it is a definitely a problem that needs to be fixed.

Normally our team just go for either the closest enemy or the weakest one

I agree with the general sentiment that in-game locations or identifiers should be used. I'm not so much concerned about the griefing aspect (Hell, I've been in the Hall many a time and done something similar to "gang up on the Asians!" or whatever. Except in my case it's usually, "Ooooh! There's Blackace's team. Okay, win or lose, we're taking them out. Blackace is not holding the Hall while I'm around." That it's more personal than just realm based and either way there's really no way of stopping behavior like that I can think of.) as I am about the disconnect. The hall-holder gets universally broadcast and I feel seeing "Some Random Pug's Team (America)" or "Der Dumkoffs (Europe) have captured the hall" takes you out of the sense of immersion and displacement that's important in an RPG. Disguising it a bit better for those of us who want to PvE and enjoy the story and not care about uber pwnage - for a little while anyway - would be a welcome addition.

I would imagine it's less for latency than it is for balancing server loads. Having people on these location specific server clusters or data-centers or whatever means that no one datacenter is getting too swamped or overly stressed which keeps the network, as a whole, a lot more stable and efficient. But, it could help with lag a bit, too, for a given player, if they're connecting through the right "world" their "first hop" is to something closer at hand. Then the individual datacenters can talk to each other as needed and probably do a lot better and more efficient job of it than just your comp in Euor talking to mine in NA.

The concept is flawed. It creates an "us vs. them" mentality that is already bad enough when it comes to Koreans. It also rewards people arbitrarily for their choice of realm. It does not reward the persons actually conquering the Hall.

I'm joining the American realm and many other Europeans will be there too. A lot of good players will be on America, and Europe will be screwed.

I think that naming the regions after ingame nations is better than real world nations just to eliminate the racism that pops up among idiots ingame. The main problem I see with naming them after ingame nations is the language barrier between nations. Many Europeans and Koreans speak English, but if English was not my first language I would want to paly with people who spoke my primary language. This is mostly solved with the current system, but not completely. While the American world is comprised of mostly USA and Canada (yes, America means North and South America, not USA.) and most of those speak english, there is a large french community in Canada and Spanish in the UNited States as well as in central and south america. Europe and Asia are much worse off this way though, since one language isn't the majority (at least in europe, how many Asians who are not from Korea play GW. There is one in my guild and I bet he is not alone).

One thign I like abotu the current set up is that each world will most likely hold the hall for much of their daylight time. Then more of the next world will start playing when they wake up/come home from wrok or school and they will gain the hall. If we can just stop the racism, then the current system will work, but otherwise I like the ingame nation system.

I agree that Worlds and languages/regions should be separate things. By default players could perhaps be placed into a district with the most players that share what language option they have selected, or that are closest to them geographically, but Worlds in themselves should be fantasy based.

I mentioned the very idea when the WaW concept was first introduced and my position has not changed. Naming it after in game regions is the way to go.

is the worlds at war system yall are refering to just the (country) placed after each team, or is there a larger aspect im missing? i just played tombs most the beta. did i miss some other type of pvp?

For my guild this change just meant that we now always meet in international districts (we did this before already, basically because international districts are sparsely populated thus reducing the amount of spam and idiots around).

We're physically located all around the world (like most guilds, I imagine), so our eventual choice of world will have nothing to do with where the most of us are - we'd probably join Korea if we could but since the choice seemed to be Europe/America we're simply avoiding the incessant "DEUTSCHE HIER???" and "ILYA DE FRANCAIS???" by joining the 'American' world.

To stay on topic, naming the worlds after in-game locations makes a lot more sense to me. It'll give people some involvement in the world, perhaps a feeling of pride for their 'homeland' (FOR ASCALON!!!) that fits with the roleplaying aspect of the game. There's enough actual real-world tension between Europe and America (the northern part, anyhow) already, it wouldn't be nice to see this bleed over into GW in any form. I sure wouldn't mind fighting side by side with people I can't even communicate with, under the banner of a make-belief faction - we may look different, speak different and be in wildly different locations, but above all we're proud Krytans! Or something.

I think the introduction of more races might introduce further confusion in this seperation of worlds, since races will very likely bring along a homeland of their own already, so worlds at war will in the end just be Tyria vs. Tyria. It's probably way too early to speculate about that, however.

seems that many ppl are saying WaW is a fundementally flawed idea, especially if based on real life worlds. we have many ppl in this guild that aren't in america.

the idea of having worlds based on in game themes sounds interesting, but doesn't fit in with the storyline atm. kryta isn't really at war with lion's arch nor is ascalon at war with anyone but the charr. there is an in-game religious war with the 5 different gods, but given the current global climate, it doesn't seem like segrating using religion is appropriate either. fanactics are scary to me.

i wouldn't be upset if they took WaW out.

voted for "in game" because of the reasons mentioned above

I'd say it would make the server balancing worse. If you want to balance server load, code something to do it on the fly. Letting people choose which server to connect to is just going to make the issue worse. Look what happens in most MMOs where you get to choose your server. All the "cool" servers get swamped at release, while others sit at 50-75% load, or less. The same thing will happen here. I would expect that 95% of english speakers would join the american server, simply to avoid communication issues. Hell, Nash is from Sweeden and he plays in the American world, just because all of us (well, maybe not me :P) are on there. That seems to be actively working against server balancing to me.

Come up with a smart way to balance server load, and just let us play a fantasy game.

I don't know why realms and WaW are being discussed as the same thing. They're completely different.

Realms are a method for cutting down on network traffic, badwidth usage, and lag, by concentrating people onto localized datacenters. As people can still meet up with friends from other datacenters in the international zones, this isn't a huge loss, though it is a minor loss as you cannot randomly bump into people from other datacenters. You do make up for this with localized languages and the like, however. It is, simply put, something that needed to be done for the sake of cost control.

WaW is a method for granting access to high-end PvE content based on a semi-arbitrary criteria. It is the reason you have teams of people sitting around in the Temple of the Ages in parties, not playing, but waiting. Plus other wonderful problems that I've beaten to death already and certainly will be brought up again in this thread. Simply put, WaW has nothing to do with server costs or latency.

Personally I think the former is a good, neccessary decision, while the latter is one of those bad ideas they're going tunnel vision on. Please differentiate the two.

Peace,
-CxE

As an Australian I have to say it's a bit of a large loss. Our population over here is going to go under the America banner, but the timezone differences we face often mean that most Americans aren't playing when we are. This means less people to play with, less new people to meet, and less of a 'global community' feel to guildwars. A couple of my European friends were forced to play as Americans because the Euro areas weren't populated enough, and because otherwise grouping together was a hassle (international districts aren't populated enough either).

If cost control can be managed without such measures it will be a huge boost, one of the BEST things about guildwars has been cut out by it.