Following up on my last post, I've been thinking more about the actual numbers involved. According to some loose (it's the internet!) research, the per-map limit has been estimated by players at around 150 per world (so 450-500 total). So let's just run with that in the absence of anything concrete.
There are currently 5 maps in WvW: Eternal Battlegrounds, Edge of the Mists, and one Borderlands for each of the 3 competing worlds (Red, Green and Blue). This amounts to a maximum number of players per world equal to 5 x 150 = 750 players.
Assuming that the weekly tournament matches are indeed exactly 7 days long, then that's 168 total playable hours during a single matchup.
If a world managed to keep all 5 WvW maps entirely full for the entire time, they would be capable of exerting 126,000 player-hours towards their cause. This is a hard cap-- no world can participate more than this due to the time limit combined with the per-map player count limits.
So to restate the question from my last post in these terms: How often does a world that logs 20,000 player hours score more points than a world that logs 90,000? My guess is never.
I suspect that only at the top end of the matchups where WvW participation is high and the maps are always nor nearly always 100% full do you see true competition on "equal" grounds where skill and strategy actually come into play. The rest of the time I suspect it's merely a matter of, "who has more bodies on the ground?" Now don't get me wrong, a big part of winning a war is who can muster a larger fighting force and it's fair (to a degree) for that to be represented in the scores, but I would like to also see normalized scores in the form of (total_world_score / world_player_hours).
Posts
