Territory War Scheduling
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The TW scheduling rules have changed significantly in Patch 390 and are not yet understood. This page describes the rules pre-patch 390. |
TW Scheduling[edit]
It is a common misconception that TWs are randomly scheduled. This is false as there is actually a fixed algorithm for assigning TWs to time slots. While some parts of the TW scheduling algorithm are not well understood, TW schedules are often fully predictable.
An attacking guild that understands this algorithm will have an advantage in being able to choose where to attack so as to get a favorable time slot with other strong factions.
The 7 Time Slots[edit]
There are 7 possible time slots where a TW may occur and are prioritized 1 through 7
1. Saturday Evening 8:00PM
2. Friday Evening 8:00PM
3. Sunday Evening 8:00PM
4. Saturday Afternoon 2:00PM
5. Sunday Afternoon 2:00PM
6. Saturday Morning 9:00AM
7. Sunday Morning 9:00AM
(Note: All times are the servers' times.)
Each slot can hold at most 3 defends or 1 attack. You usually don't have attacks and defends at the same time.
When a faction has more than 21 territories to defend the system doubles the capacity of the timeslots. This means the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th attackers will fall into the first time slot filling it up to 6 simultaneous attacks.
TW Ordering[edit]
These slots are exactly filled up in order left to right and top to bottom. All TWs for a single faction are scheduled before scheduling of the TWs for another faction is calculated.
What determines which faction gets scheduled first isnt always clear but it seems as if the faction with the greatest number of defends has its scheduling calculated first.
The TWs on a factions territory are first ordered left to right and top to bottom (like reading a page from a book) and then segregated into groups of 3. Refer to this example map for the rest:
In the example the orange TWs are calculated first (probably because there are more orange TWs than red TWs). The 11 orange TWs are ordered 1-11 (left to right top to bottom). 1-3 will get the first slot for Sat Evening. 4-6 will get the second slot for Friday Evening, 7-9 get the third slot for Sunday Evening, 10-11 fill in the 4th slot for Saturday Afternoon.
At this point all the TWs on the territory have been calculated so we move on to the red territory. In going through the territories again we have 12 13 14 slated for slot 1 however 13 has a conflict for slot 1 because of a simultaneous defend and is skipped till later so 12 14 and 15 get slot 1. These all share the slot with 1 2 and 3 actually so the schedule for Saturday evening (aka slot 1) would be
- 8:00 #1
- 8:03 #2
- 8:06 #3
- 8:09 #12
- 8:12 #14
- 8:15 #15
to avoid having multiple TWs start at the exact same time.
Finally at the end we place unscheduled 13 at the first free time slot that works with both red and orange factions. The first slot that is available is slot 5 since orange has defenses during slots 1-4 so 13 happens on Sunday afternoon. It's not clear if 13 is calculated before or after 12 14 and 15 were scheduled but it didnt make a difference in this case.
The important parts to realize are:
- All the orange TWs were scheduled first and filled up the slots in order.
- 13 was pushed to the first free slot that works for Orange and Red.
