"But players are being punished for playing at a different time. If you don't play at the time of the night zerg then you lose the game and all your work during your time of play doesn't matter because the rate of change during primetime is much slower than the rate of change during off-peak.
You are punishing people for having to sleep or work. The top tier matchups are much more competitive during the weekend than during the weekday. Is that because more people are playing around the clock? Yes. Is the reason they are playing because they don't have to work? YES. Are you now punishing people for playing when they have the free time to play? YES."
No, you're not being punished playing at a different time. Your server is "punished" because people aren't playing. It's expected that players cannot play 24/7 for the reasons you mentioned, thus why the various alliances actively recruited international guilds.
You're still playing, helping scoring points and secure positions for your server. That the other players on your server don't care enough to keep that going around the clock is the fault of your own server, as cold as that is to say.
This is just nonsense tre. You can't have it both ways. You can't argue that people shouldn't be punished for when they play and they try to dismiss other examples of this as "well its the rest of your server's fault."
Here is the problem:
Taking a keep that is will defended is worth the same amount of points as taking a keep that is not defended. Taking a defended keep during primetime takes more time, and takes more resources. It is easier and faster to take an empty keep, so "night zerging" is the most effective tactic towards points. While doing this, the night zerging team has to burn less resources.
So accomplishing things with more effort, resources and commitment is ultimately worth less than accomplishing things versus minimal resistance. Accomplishing harder tasks is weighted less than accomplishing easy tasks. That is a broken setup.
Nobody is arguing against that. (I hope.)
The game has a scoreboard and that makes points important. This makes night zerging most important. Unfortunately, night zerging is not fun for either side. When SBI rolls through an empty borderlands, it's pretty much a snoozefest. When the Aussies roll through an empty Borderlands for HoD, it's pretty much a reason to quit WvWvW and go to the rest of the game.
Ultimately, and this is in accordance to ANet's own bravado, people should be doing and playing what they want to play and not playing or doing something out of obligation. People should be playing when they have free time to play and not be punished for that, instead of quitting work or school to keep their WvWvW match competitive.
But if you go down the road of everyone must have 24/7 Coverage or face a non-competitive and slanted battlefield, then you start to go down the path of playing out of obligation instead of playing for fun or due to your own choice.
This issue is created by people playing outside of their region. That issue is created by ANet not having region restrictions, but also not even having an Asian region or full Asian market launch. When Peters talks about doing things that they don't have the resources for, I imagine that includes the lack of a natural Asian/Oceanic region to better match up people playing at similar hours.
When that region is eventually made then population coverage could scuttle around again.
So your solution or HoD's solution isn't future proof, but even then, it does create a standard that works against having regions at all. You could then have Asian servers recruiting American guilds to night cap for them and create non-competitive matchups in their region and easy wins. You will still have servers like HoD trying to retain 24/7 coverage and stealing from other regional servers just to win.
It's ultimate solution leads to long 24/7 queues for players in top servers trying to WvWvW. All these weeks of complaining about constant queues and now they're the solution? Come on.
The goal should be to create matchups more like the top tier matchup during the weekend or more like what a SBI/JQ/ET matchup might be like. Those sort of fights retain interest in WvWvW. Night capping deters interest in the game, so you shouldn't eb ancouraging night capping as much as the current system does. You also can't assure everyone will have 24/7 coverage and making that the standard creates more problems.
So the solution does involve removing points or better protecting people against night zerg. It does involve rewarding the best parts of WvWvW with more points instead of the last enjoyable parts of WvWvW creating the biggest point difference. It also involves smarter match making.
If that punishes people who play off-peak in some way then so be it. I play off-peak. I want more interesting fights when I'm losing or when I'm steamrolling. But since I play off-peak, I don't expect to fight a huge army. It's ridiculous to expect that. Playing against nobody is a punishment as well, one created by lack of a Oceanic v Oceanic matchup. It's ridiculous to decide a fight by taking empty keeps. It's ridiculous that 4 hours of a day when less are fighting matter more than the rest of the day when the most are fighting.
