City Winner History?

[nuadarstark]

Haha cry bout loses when 150 order in zone cant besiege 75 destro. Also when your pugs build warband like Fixer obviously they lose any 24v24 fights. Drukar bw who have 12 ppl and stay afk when he have other 12 ppl on destro lol.

Alright, I'll bite - when does that actually happen? Aside from maybe late NA / aussie time? Over last couple of weeks, destro population has been almost universally higher than the Order pop in the more populated TZs. So again, why does Order cry when they're attempting to maneuver 3 zones to push the campaign, trying to dodge the 80-100 players larger Destro zerg? I wonder why, I really do...

[TreefAM]

Does order even have warband leaders that do rvr outside of guild events.
The only folk I see running regularly are Toymachine, Beastz and that bw who's name I can't spell.

[Spellbound]

End cross realming.

No free realm switch if you’re been on 90 minutes. Timer should start once you log off. If you played Order to help push city with plan to play Destro in there, you should be SOL.

Apply a 4 hour realm switch timer starting when you log out.

[nuadarstark]

Does order even have warband leaders that do rvr outside of guild events.
The only folk I see running regularly are Toymachine, Beastz and that bw who's name I can't spell.

Well, yes from the complete PUG organised WB standpoint, we have us RoA alliance folks (Aillune, Beastz, Toymachine plus occasional overflow leaders), Graffer and then guild WBs who are looking to fill up their ranks with people they at least know like when CNTK, Bene, LbL look for people on region or /t4. That said I don't usually push it past 2 in the morning CEST, so NA folks also might have some other leaders.

[velenne]

Trolls and destro players with blinders. I am Jack's total lack of surprise so far in this thread. Anyway, for those of you with thoughtful points:

I'd be curious to see if we could zoom in and see how many order wins there were after the Shadow Warrior buffs that lasted for all of a week or whatever it was. I see that the cities are numbered, but not dates associated with them except for "after 4/16."

They happened the same day as the morale nerf, 10th June. Order won the majority of subsequent cities which you can see in my previous post, so it's impossible to say if the turnaround was due to the SW nerfs that followed or Destro relearning a new meta. If you'll permit me to put a pin in this thought for a moment, I'll return to it by the end of this post...

Does order even have warband leaders that do rvr outside of guild events.
The only folk I see running regularly are Toymachine, Beastz and that bw who's name I can't spell.

I think this may be a big part of the issue. I would be curious to see what percentage of active CR40 players on Order and Destro are guilded and how many guilds are active on average during the EU and NA prime times. My hunch is that Order is more disparate and that just doesn't work in a game of numbers like this. If Order wants to compete they need to form bigger alliances. That being said, the relative balance of IC and Altdorf pushes (recent history notwithstanding) leads me to believe that oRvR has enough moving parts that, barring very extreme population differences, one side doesn't dominate the other.

However, this thread is about Cities, not oRvR.

Is this why Order is the way it is?

No sir , its because of the **** of utility overstack that the polished destro classes have

This. Or something adjacent to it.

Let me take the pin back out now, @Honshu: These stats indicate to me that there is a synergy of destro classes and the relative (to Order) ease with which they fall into a meta-friendly composition. The meta is the melee ball and Order has too many ranged classes that are fun to play (as evidenced by the abundance of them) and bad for the melee ball.

I refuse to believe that the two realms are drawn from different populations of humans and that one of them is just inherently superior to the other. That kind of thinking is fundamentally flawed. It may be the case that destro has edged out order in having full sov gear and that they continue to log in for cities in that gear, but I have a hard time imagining that such players are prevalent enough to shift the balance that much. I could be wrong on that though.

Better escapes and snares for order, fewer AoE pulls and knockdowns for destro, maybe that's all the endgame the needs?

End cross realming.

No free realm switch if you’re been on 90 minutes. Timer should start once you log off. If you played Order to help push city with plan to play Destro in there, you should be SOL.

Apply a 4 hour realm switch timer starting when you log out.

I'd like to find a way to disincentivize x-realming but I don't see a way. It's too easy to beat. Besides, that's a different discussion.

[Foofmonger]

Anecdotally, I'll say this from my destro perspective of cities:

1. There are a few top-tier order groups/wbs. These groups can beat anyone, and/or have a good chance to beat the top-tier destro groups. At the very highest levels of play, things seem slightly in orders favor, but overall pretty balanced.

2. There are a decent amount of medium-tier order groups/wbs. These groups tend to lose to the top-tier destro (as expected) but also struggle hard against mid-tier destro.

3. There are a ton of order pugs, and these guys lose to everyone, including destro pugs.

So anecdotally, what I see is some kind of scale for organization. At low levels of organization, it seems that destros natural "easy synergy" and lack of "non-WB viable classes (and distribution of classes as a whole), leads destro to more city victories. As the destro and order get more and more knowledgable/coordinated, that gap closes and closes until it disappears at high levels of play.

Now this causes a conunundrum, because if you just "blanket nerf destro and buff order", it might help balance out the lower/middle tier cities, but it throws the top-tier balance out of whack. So any kind of proposed balanced solution would need to look at buffing up the strength of less coordinated order, while not pushing highly coordinated order into the "unbeatable" territory. That would likely mean more efficacy on some of orders non-meta underperforming classes (IBs, SWs, etc..), and not boosting up the classes that are already extremely strong (WP, Slayers, WLs, BWs, Knights, etc..).

What that would likely do is allow for the average middle/lower tier wb to have more natural "easy synergy", which would immensely help their win rates in these less coordinated cities.

Now of course, there are a variety of other potential factors as to why, and Velenne covered many of them already (overall faction organization, class distribution, etc..). I'm going to have to agree that I don't think there is some kind of huge cognitive split between the types of players they play one side or another, that seems like a ludicrous assumption as many players play both sides.

I do think class distribution is a major factor that we need to considered here too. Let's think of this in pure mathematical terms, if Engineers make up 10% of the Order playerbase, and Magii make up 5%. Lets say we have 504 order and 504 destro on, there's only so many ways those classes can be distributed. This will also equate to exactly 21 city instances if everyone queues.

So, in this example, we have roughly 25 Magi and 50 Engineers looking for city WB spots. Unfortunately, most WBs don't want to take more than 1 of them. That means that 3 Magii and 29 Engineers are now trying to fill spots that aren't wanted in. So you can see how this class distribution can lead to issues. If you have 3 pug Magii, it's probably somewhat statistically irrelevant. However 29 Pug Engineers means you will likely have 3-4 per pug wb, and you can see why thats an issue in winning a city. So overall class distribution is a very important concept for understanding the overall city win rate distribution. In this example, lets assume that roughly 2/3rds of the WBs aren't completely pugging and won't take a 2nd Engineer, that means that Order needs to fill 7 wbs with 29 engineers, so on average to fit them in you need 7 pug wbs who are running 4 engineers each, all of these will basically auto-lose the city.

I have a sneaking suspicion that there are X number of Order pugs that are over-filled with DPS and under-filled with tanks/healers, who make up the "chaff" of who doesn't get into the "Good wbs". My own anecdotal evidence in fighting these 4-6 engine pugs (or 10-12 DPS order pugs) also aligns with this theory. I also think this highly aligns with the overall city win rate, as basically every city, Order immediately throws away about 1/3rd of their instances, whereas Destro probably throws away 1/10th.

I wish I could find that post where someone data-mined the class distribution, but from memory I do remember that BW/Engineer are waaaay over-played in comparison to Sorc/Magus and that SMs/IBs are far underplayed in comparison to BOs/BGs (not 100% accurate, but basically Order has 2x as many BWs/Engineers as Destroy has Sorcs/Magus, and they have about 50% of the non-aura tanks). Now this isn't to discount the balance discussion, I think that's still a valid thing to discuss, but I think we all need a baseline understanding of the class distribution issue which I think leads heavily into overall city win-rates, which is the premise this discussion is all about.

[agemennon675]

Everyone can have dreams about why order lose most of the city instances, there answer is simple, there are alot of non-meta/not-WB viable classes on order(WH,SW,AM,Engi) These players cannot join any warband and their only option to gear up is by pugging, easy to say group up/organise etc. this is not hard to see, as much as some people wants to deny it

[Foofmonger]

Everyone can have dreams about why order lose most of the city instances, there answer is simple, there are alot of non-meta/not-WB viable classes on order(WH,SW,AM,Engi) These players cannot join any warband and their only option to gear up is by pugging, easy to say group up/organise etc. this is not hard to see, as much as some people wants to deny it

Yea more or less, I covered this above, but it's a dual issue.

You can make classes more "meta" viable, but that won't necessarily solve class distribution issues. Even if SWs and Engineers are better/more meta, there's not going to be room for 6-8 of them in a city. It's a combination of under-performing classes (of which destro also has some, just not as many), plus poor overall realm class distribution. Destro would also be having issues if they had as many Maguses trying to do city as Order has Engies.

So yea, I think those classes need to be looked at for more meta wb viability, but we should also understand as a community that this is only one piece of the puzzle. I could imagine seeing SW/WH (and WE)/IB/AM buffs and not seeing the city win rates change much.

[agemennon675]

Everyone can have dreams about why order lose most of the city instances, there answer is simple, there are alot of non-meta/not-WB viable classes on order(WH,SW,AM,Engi) These players cannot join any warband and their only option to gear up is by pugging, easy to say group up/organise etc. this is not hard to see, as much as some people wants to deny it

Yea more or less, I covered this above, but it's a dual issue.

You can make classes more "meta" viable, but that won't necessarily solve class distribution issues. Even if SWs and Engineers are better/more meta, there's not going to be room for 6-8 of them in a city. It's a combination of under-performing classes (of which destro also has some, just not as many), plus poor overall realm class distribution. Destro would also be having issues if they had as many Maguses trying to do city as Order has Engies.

So yea, I think those classes need to be looked at for more meta wb viability, but we should also understand as a community that this is only one piece of the puzzle. I could imagine seeing SW/WH (and WE)/IB/AM buffs and not seeing the city win rates change much.

If stacking SW's WH's IB's AM's was as viable as stacking other classes like kotbs-wp-bw-WL-SL these people could form their own warbands and not feel useless and will win more instances than they were previously(pugging and losing %100) if you take 4 engi 2sw 2wh as your dps right now you are going to lose it against pug 2-2-2 anyway which leads to people to solo que

[Foofmonger]

Everyone can have dreams about why order lose most of the city instances, there answer is simple, there are alot of non-meta/not-WB viable classes on order(WH,SW,AM,Engi) These players cannot join any warband and their only option to gear up is by pugging, easy to say group up/organise etc. this is not hard to see, as much as some people wants to deny it

Yea more or less, I covered this above, but it's a dual issue.

You can make classes more "meta" viable, but that won't necessarily solve class distribution issues. Even if SWs and Engineers are better/more meta, there's not going to be room for 6-8 of them in a city. It's a combination of under-performing classes (of which destro also has some, just not as many), plus poor overall realm class distribution. Destro would also be having issues if they had as many Maguses trying to do city as Order has Engies.

So yea, I think those classes need to be looked at for more meta wb viability, but we should also understand as a community that this is only one piece of the puzzle. I could imagine seeing SW/WH (and WE)/IB/AM buffs and not seeing the city win rates change much.

If stacking SW's WH's IB's AM's was as viable as stacking other classes like kotbs-wp-bw-WL-SL these people could form their own warbands and not feel useless and will win more instances than they were previously(pugging and losing %100) if you take 4 engi 2sw 2wh as your dps right now you are going to lose it against pug 2-2-2 anyway which leads to people to solo que

Unfortunately that would require basically a full rework of the game. Every class should have a niche a purpose, and a role in cities. However, to make things like Engies/Maguses as viable as Sorcs/BWs is probably more about nerfing Sorcs/BWs than it is about buffing Engineers/Magi. Same goes for Chosen/KoTBS in relation to BG/IB. Some of these classes are just more viable by design, and it's very difficult to balance in relation to one another. If you buff other RDPS damage up to Sorc/BW levels, this makes the Sorc/BW no longer "as viable", as those other classes aren't as squishy and have a variety of utility/cc that the sorc/bw doesn't get. For BG/IB, trying to buff them up to Chosen/KOTBS levels... how are you going to make it so that a single target buffer/debuffer is viable in comparison to an AoE one? The reality is you can't just boost the IB/BG to be so strong on a single target that they are better picks than Chosen/KoTBS because they would be incredibly OP and broken.

I don't see that happening honestly. Looks like the devs philosophy is more one of 'every class should have a viable role in cities", but not "every class can fulfill the same spots in a wb", no matter what you do to an IB for example, the chance that you don't want 4 KoTBS in a city WB seems slim to none.

Plus, when we talk about Destro//Order, roughly speaking the Engineer is only a little less viable than a Magus (basically you want 1 rifter/puller max), and WE/WH are both more or less "a rough pick", so really it's mostly about SWs not having a current niche and MSHs having one, and AMs having a super nichey-niche whereas Shamans have more overall application currently (still, most groups only want to bring 1).

The point I'm trying to make is this: Even if you re-balance the classes, due the nature of the city content, there will still be meta picks and still be classes that are only wanted 1-2 of, that's how "metas" work, and there's no way to really change this. So class distribution is a real issue, and balance won't solve running too many Engies/BWs. The BW is a great example in and of itself, as nobody can complain that the class isn't meta or it's weak (as it's obviously not) but there are still far too many on Order trying to do cities. Again, you don't need 6 BWs in a city wb. So we can see a live example of "the class is balanced, but we don't need this many" in action.