I've decided to split my World versus World (WvW) research into two posts. I'll talk about how Guild Wars 2 and WvW works. Then explain what I wanted to research, why, and how. Lastly, I'll show the result using the desert map. The second post will contain the other results and the conclusion I drew from them. I still need time as I'm missing six transitions. In the meantime, let's get this post started.
Guild Wars 2 And World Versus World[1][2]
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| Ill. 1: Approximate Points Per Objective And Dolyak Path With And Without Buffs ~GreenyNeko & WvW Intel |
- Desert Borderland for red,
- two alpine borderlands for green and blue,
- and the eternal battlegrounds shared by all.
While the borderland maps are biased to their color, the eternal battlegrounds aren't.
Score System[1][2]
The server with the most victory points wins. Servers get these given their war score at the end of a skirmish. There are many ways to get Warscore for the 84 two-hour-long skirmishes. For example, killing another player awards two to five points depending on the buffs. Every five minutes, the game also awards Warscore for each owned object. Type and rank determine the amount, as shown in the following table.
| Type | Base | Secured | Reinforced | Fortified |
| Camp | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Tower | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Keep | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 |
| Castle | 12 | 18 | 24 | 30 |
Lastly, the game awards one Warscore when an enemy's Dolyak dies or when your Dolyak arrives at its goal. Dolyaks start at a camp and walk to nearby towers and then to nearby larger settlements if a server owns these.
It is similar to owning a street in monopoly, gaining a bonus for the whole alley. That raises the question, how much the bonus is worth and how it compares between the servers.
Approach And Difficulties
To answer these, we must study the Dolyaks in their natural habitat. Specifically, we need to know Dolyaks' speed with and without buffs With this data, we can estimate the time of buffed Dolyaks. Next up, we have to measure how long it takes a Dolyak to reach its destination. It's exhaustive to get this data as the other servers try to conquer as much as possible. Additionally, they try to kill you and the Dolyak you watch. However, your team can screw up your data too by giving swiftness or superspeed to the Dolyaks, giving inaccurate measurements.
Researching Dolyaks
I've already measured the Dolyaks movement speed in an earlier post. So, the next step is to measure how long they travel from their camp to each objective. I used the program Livesplit for this, which speedrunners commonly use for timing speed runs. When the Dolyak spawned, I started the timer and stopped it when the "war score" marker appeared once the Dolyak reached its goal. With the data gathered, we now need to look at two different cases. When the camp and tower are ours but not the keep or castle, the Dolyak will continuously run between the two conquered objectives. However, if we own all three objectives, the Dolyak will despawn after reaching its goal and respawn about seven seconds later. Next up, we get math involved.
Finalization And Representation
By dividing the point we get through the time it took the Dolyak to arrive there, we get the Dolyak's points per second. We can multiply this by five (5*60=300) to compare to objectives. For the visuals, I've linked the camp with the Dolyaks end goal. Now, for visualizing the data, I'm going to mark the objectives with white-filled black circles. Then I link the camp where the Dolyak starts with its end goal. Lastly, I add the score objectives and Dolyaks give. We can see the result in the illustration for the desert borderland.
For The Future
Once I have gotten all data, I'm going to write the second post. Until then, this has to suffice. Oh, I'll also write the conclusion in the second post. When will it come? Once, WvW is going well enough for me to get the data.
[1] https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/World_versus_World
[2] Guild Wars 2 - ArenaNet
