10 September 2021

Interactive Post: How Long Guild Wars 2 WvW Reward Tracks Take [Updated]

The post is now up to date with the 9th November patch! There's a comparison with the old system at the end.

With Elona neither being green nor dominating any matches, I couldn't finish the World versus World
(WvW) Dolyak research yet. However, I noticed an inaccuracy in Guild Wars 2 wiki's minimum WvW reward track time.

Screenshot of the World vs World Reward Track Tab
from Guild Wars 2 by GreenyNeko
What Are The World vs World Reward Tracks?

Players find the reward tracks in their tab in the WvW window. By playing WvW, they gain participation, determining how much reward track progress they get every 5-minute match tick. This table shows the progress given the variables.[2]


Map Tier 0 Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 4 Tier 5 Tier 6
Core WvW Maps 0 25 60 95 125 160 195
Edge of the Mists 0 19 46 76 90 120 146

The following buffs further increase these:[2]

Buff Bonus
Guild Enhancement: World Reward Track 3-10%
Experience Booster 50%
Black Lion Boost 25%
Festival Gobbler Boost 25%
Celebration Bonus 10%
WvW Reward Track Enrichment 5%
Call of War 25%

The buffs sum up to 1.0+0.1+0.5+0.25+0.25+0.1+0.05+0.25=1.5 or 150%. Given that reward tracks need 20000 points, the wiki's supposed minimum estimate is 20000/(195*(1.0+1.25))*5=228 minutes or 3h 50m.[2]


The Discrepancy

But there are two more sources of reward track progress: Dailies and the skirmish reward track. Since a day has 24 hours and ticks happen every five minutes, we get (24*60)/5=288 ticks. Add that dailies awards players 3*250=750 progress[1] we gain 750/288=2.60 per tick.

The skirmish reward track gives players one to seven 25 point-rewarding-Instant Reward Track Progress. The amount and frequency depend on the player's skirmish track progress. More on it over at Guild Wars 2: Time Consumption of WvW Pips.[1]


First Interactive Post! Woooo!

With all the variables, I leave the selection to the reader, allowing them to choose the calculation and result of their interest.

Map

Boosts








Pips








Calculation

[1] Guild Wars 2

[2] https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/WvW_Reward_Track

[3] https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/104411-game-update-notes-november-9-2021/

22 July 2021

Guild Wars 2 WvW - True Camp Value - Part 1

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]

Image Showing The Results For Desert Borderlands
Ill. 1: Approximate Points Per Objective And Dolyak Path
With And Without Buffs ~GreenyNeko & WvW Intel
Guild Wars 2 is an MMORPG that allows players to play on different servers within a region. The server's choice barely plays a role in gameplay. In the game mode World versus World (WvW), however, these servers fight each other every week in a three-way match. Each server is assigned the colors red, blue, and green, given their rank. WvW contains four maps:

  • 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






16 April 2021

Among Us - Travel Distance

One of the methods that didn't make it into my Among Us seminar paper is distance measuring. Instead of the exact, I used graph distance. Since given the states of the latter one, they aren't compatible.

What Unit Would Our Speed Be?

We define speed as the distance something moves within a specific time frame. In Guild Wars 2, we could convert between in-game units and meters.[1] However, Among Us doesn't have this to my knowledge. So, alternatively, we need to abstract this by creating a custom unit. We could choose rooms per second, players per second, and so on, but I've decided on the standard vision per second. Thus we can measure rooms in vision distance. Furthermore, if a room's wall distance is higher than one, players can't see it whole within their vision sphere. 

Measurement Of Movement Speed

ApproachAmongUsVelocity
Ill. 1: The approach to measuring velocity given
 crewmate vision ~GreenyNeko
To measure the velocity, we create a lobby with four instances. While you can do this with friends, it also works using Bluestacks instances. We use the recommended settings for the room (which we can consider as the standard settings). For the measurement, any map with a big room where you can walk in linearly will do. I decided to use the cafeteria of the Skeld. We place one of the players in the middle, and the other player will walk into the vision cone on one side and out on the other side, as demonstrated in the image on the right. A decent way to measure the velocity is to record the player's movement from the stationary player's view and then check how many frames have passed between entering and leaving the vision bubble. With the first frame at 78 (=1.3s) and the last at 335 (=5.5833s) the resulting speed is one player vision in 4.28333s or 1 crewvision / 4.28333 seconds = 0.23346cv/s.

Measuring The Map


SkeldWithDistances
Skeld with most distances measured ~GreenyNeko

Now having the player movement speed, we can use it in combination with the time it takes to get from one point to another to determine the distance of walls and hallways. These tools allow us to measure the whole map and use the data to approximate how long it takes us from one spot to another. The image on the left shows the result for the Skeld map. We can do this for the other maps, but I'll leave it at Skeld for this post. When we sum up the horizontal and vertical distances, we get the total distance approximation from one point to another. However, since players can walk diagonally, the sum is an overestimation of the shortest path.

Conclusion

An example of this would be the distance from navigation to the reactor.
Given:

Navigation to Weapons: 0.307cv+0.074cv/2+0.218cv+0.144cv+0.189cv = 0.894cv
Weapons to Cafeteria:0.116cv+0.125cv*2+0.237cv+0.198cv = 0.801cv
(guessing missing distances) 
Cafeteria to Upper Engine:1.012cv+0.237cv/2+0.77cv = 1.9005cv
(including the button) 
Upper Engine to Reactor: 0.397cv/2+0.339cv+1/3*0.498cv = 0.7035cv

In total that's 0.894cv+0.801cv+1.9005cv+0.7035cv = 4.299cv 
This would take a player 4.299cv / 0.23346cv/s = 18.414s. With a quick check on mobile and approximately reaching around 18s (Well 20s minus getting stuck twice and starting/stopping the timer), our calculation isn't too far off. We can do this for each room and enter the distances into a graph. Alternatively, we can take an already created graph and sum the distances for it.

[1]https://www.greenyneko.com/2018/01/guild-wars-2-velocity.html

10 March 2021

Self-Experiment: Effect Of Alcohol On Personality

With the exams and seminar paper behind my back, for now, I'm back writing blog posts. A few months ago, while researching personality in psychology, I found a paper on a self-study about alcohol's effect on personality. Given this, I got curious about its influence on my personality.

Disclaimer Regarding Alcohol Consumption

Before I share my research, I want to mention that I - in no way - recommend or encourage alcohol consumption. Excessive drinking is dangerous, if not even fatal. As such, I want to discourage any attempts of copying the described approach here. If, despite all, you still plan to try it yourself, talk to a doctor beforehand to help you stay safe.


Personality Models in Psychology

Most people probably heard about the Myers-Briggs personality types. However, the best is a personality model backed by a lot of research, which is the case for the five-factor model (FFM).  FFM categorizes personality into five dimensions. You can remember these by the mnemonic OCEAN, where the letters stand for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, respectively. It is widely used and appended with systems like the NEO-PI-R, adding six facets to each dimension.

Meaning of OCEAN[1,2]

I won't explain the whole FFM in this blog post. However, I do think explaining the domains and facets helps, understanding the results.

Openness: Often short-form for "Openness to Experience" is linked with intellect, intelligence, and creativity. It describes how curious and open people are to new experiences and also how liberal they are.

It is then split into the facets of:
imagination              
artistic interests        
emotionality             
adventurousness      
intellect
and liberalism
people higher in imagination use fantasy to spice up the ordinary life
how much interest and appreciation a person has in art
how much people are aware of and able to access their own feelings
determines how much people avoid routines and explore or try out new things
the interest people have in abstract ideas and thinking hard
determining how likely people are to challenge convention and tradition

Conscientiousness: This one is linked with the need for cleanliness, structure, and order. People who end up on the higher end feel the need to be useful and successful and they are careful and plan ahead.

Its facets are:
Self-Efficacy
Orderliness
Dutifulness
Achievement-Striving
Self-Discipline
Cautiousness
how confident people are in their ability of achievement
describes people's organization and cleanliness
determines a person's sense of duty and obligation
defines how hard a person strives for accomplishments
how self-disciplines a person is
how careful people are on their decisions

Extroversion: Most people are familiar with the idea of someone extroverted. That's the basis of this domain.

This domain has the facets:

Friendliness
Gregariousness
Assertiveness
Activity Level
Excitement-Seeking
Cheerfulness

is associated with how open people are towards others
describes how much people enjoy the company of others and of how many
assertive people take the initiative and lead
determines how much people enjoy a busy instead of a relaxed life
correlates to the interest in risks and thrills
is associated with how strong people feel positive emotions


Agreeableness: Agreeable people are nicer towards other people even strangers.

It has the facets:
Trust
Morality
Altruism
Cooperation
Modesty
Sympathy

determines how much a person believes others are fair or good
correlates with sincere and unguarded people behave towards others
is how much people enjoy helping others
is associated with the will of compromising or forfeiting on your needs for others
describes how modest people are
gives how much people can feel the pain of others

Neuroticism: Neuroticism is linked to the reaction to negative emotions. People high in neuroticism are more likely to be pessimistic or faster to be affected by stress and negative emotions.

The facets are:
Anxiety
Anger
Depression
Self-Consciousness
Immoderation
Vulnerability

defines how often and fast people become anxious or stressed
is how fast or easy people get angry
is the tendency to feel depressed
determines how much people care about what others think
is the ability to resist lust and cravings
describes the ability to withstand stress

The Approach

With FFM explained, let's see how I approached the self-experiment. There's a website by a Professor of the Pennsylvania State University which provides a personality test using FFM Neo PI-R given the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP).[2] To determine the alcohol's effect we'll take the delta before and after consumption. For this, I did the IPIP sober, using the full 300-item inventory for higher accuracy. For the second round, I prepared both cocktails and water. The purpose of the water is to combat hypohydration (water deficit) from the alcohol. Instead of measuring the exact alcoholemia (alcohol level in blood), I stopped drinking once physical and mental symptoms appeared. These include a slowdown of eyes, balance issues, increased talkativeness, and heightened mood. After repeating the IPIP, I compared the results.

The Results

Due to privacy, I'll publish the delta instead of the exact results.

Openness
+1
Conscientiousness
+0
Extraversion
+21
Agreeableness +10 Neuroticism
-8
Imagination
+12
Self-Efficacy
-6
Friendliness
+24
Trust
+18
Anxiety
-11
Artistic Interests +5 Orderliness
+0
Gregariousness
+22
Morality
+21
Anger
+0
Emotionality
+16
Dutifulness
-6
Assertiveness
+8
Altruism
+0
Depression
-16
Adventurousness +0 Achievement-Striving +13  Activity Level
+0
Cooperation
-5
Self-Consciousness -24
Intellect
-22
 Self-Discipline
+13
Excitement-Seeking +13 Modesty
+3
Immoderation
+12
Liberalism
-7
Cautiousness
-29
Cheerfulness
+16
Sympathy
+5
Vulnerability
+5

When evaluating the results, it is important to keep in mind, results from personality tests deviate to a certain degree. Thus, we should only consider significant changes. Let's consider any deltas smaller or equal to five as insignificant.

We often link behaviors such as increased extraversion, decreased cautiousness and decreased worry to alcohol consumption. The changes across the whole extraversion domain reflect this increase. The big drop in cautiousness matches too. Lastly, the decrease of worry appears in the decrement of certain facets in neuroticism as well. Interestingly imagination increased, and intellect decreased. Especially since we shouldn't confuse the latter with intelligence. Another interesting discovery is the increase of immoderation by quite a bit, making it harder to resist drinking more, which results in a vicious cycle.

Conclusion

I rarely get drunk, but it sometimes happens during parties or celebrations. I felt like I'm more lost in thought, occasionally bursting out. I also enjoy philosophy even more than without, which is weird. So, I was interested in the result. Now given it, it seems typical and according to expectation. Non-the-less it is still interesting.

[1] 2017 Personality 14: Introduction to Traits/Psychometrics/The Big 5 - Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCceO_D4AlY
[2] International Personality Item Pool Representation of the NEO PI-R http://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/
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I'm a B.Sc. Games Engineer and I created this blog to share my ideas, theorycrafting, thoughts and whatever I'm working on or doing.