Guild Wars 2

I will not make assumptions that GW2 player population is dying, as I don’t have any information to back it up. What I can say is that in my own opinion, the design decision to split players into worlds is a huge problem that doesn’t work well with how GW2 is designed in the first place with the instanced/separated nature of dungeons, pvp, and world vs world.

Problem 1 – Short term density problems: too many servers, too little purpose for the open world
In NA there are a whopping 24 servers. There are 24 open world maps. Based on the assumption that 500 people (an old WvW figure from BWE1-3) can be available on a map that’s 24*24*500 = 288K players. In reality, we see 15-20 people scattered in each open world map, maybe 40-50 if it has a dragon event going on. The open world is really only ever used for leveling and map completion – as people reach the end game, the maps will rarely be revisited. The rest of the player base are all running dungeons, personal instances, WvW or sPvP, none of which matter because they are cross server already.

Problem 2 – Long term density problems
In the long term, no doubt ANet will be releasing new maps – Crystal Desert, Ring of Fire, Isle of Janthir, Woodland Cascades to name a few to be anticipated in the near future. We saw what happened with Southsun Cove though – huge influx of players in the new map, after players have done all the content and the event was over, poof, now empty… The new maps will either replicate this, or make it true for the existing maps (Orr).

Problem #3 – Servers only serve World vs World
The 24 NA servers fulfill two things; the feeling of belongingness (that people don’t care about for PvE, as proven in problem #2), and the separation of players for the purpose of WvW (where people do care about that feeling of belongingness).

Problem 2 – Guesting
Guesting has proved something of a savior to GW2, other than to gate WvW transfers; we are slowly seeing communities picking and joining the “unofficial PvE” server (Tarnished Coast). It raises the question why we need Guesting in the first place, if people all just want to get together in the same map.

I’m sure there are more problems this has caused but those 4 are what I feel the biggest issues. Nevertheless, the split servers have served its purpose, and I think it’s time to merge all the servers. For launch it probably was very important to split the players so as to not cause lag, except that GW2 has the overflow system, so I can only discern that this is a design decision to split the players solely for the purpose of belongingness and WvW.

I don’t think I’ve ever come across a person who has disliked overflows. Better than sitting in a queue. I personally also never felt any different in the “persistence” feeling achieved through my efforts be any greater while in the main server compared to the overflow. It’s just cycled content that will reoccur eventually and I’m not fooled.

The solution is a difficult feat. There’ll be code to sift through to untangle anything that ties World selection with PvE and WvW. But the eventual outcome that the servers merge into one, or two/three is there are capacity issues, will be much better for the PvE community.

I do forsee some minor issues, for example the map capacity will mean if there are 500 (estimated) players trying to fight a world boss, likely that 501th person and above will be kicked into overflows. Not a huge problem if the event reward is account bound for its duration, as then the overflows can synchronise with the main world when the world bosses appear in the overflows. ANet did this with the Karka event (with some minor flaws), so I don’t see it technically impossible.

Thoughts?

tldr;
Problem: too many servers, too many problems, 4 arguments to prove my point
Solution: Merge all the PvE servers back into one world, make use of overflow shards instead. World selection to only matter for WvW
Consequence: Guesting made redundant

<Did not speak for EU, as I assume the problem is slightly different due to language barriers>

I don’t think the problem is too many servers or too few people, the problem is that there is too little reward for returning to the lower level areas. I mean if the game put more reason, both in a loot reward sense and in a personal reward sense (more physical change brought to the world based on the character’s actions) the other areas would have much more reason for players to return to them.

That’s the way I think about it Narc.

which is what they are working on and hoping to add the withe guild quests and so on.. MOAR PvE is what the game needs yea, thats the ticket.. yea…

If you want to keep the same number of servers for WvW I don’t care, but I would argue that that number could be reduced. I’ve never had to wait in line to do WvW regardless of the time I play. Our server is around 17 in the rankings, so there are several other servers that have enven less people on.

The other option would be to make the PVE maps instance only. Maps in the 30 to 60 range are ghost towns. On my server, the only PVE areas with a decent number of people are Orr and the starter human area. Also, trying to find people to do dungeons is very difficult. All of this would be improved by making the PVE areas instance only.

All servers are already working together.

And then players on those servers are divided in worlds for WvW purposes.

Each world uses servers as needed.

Please know that I’m trying to say that there is no purpose for these servers in PvE, not that there isn’t any purpose to return to the low level maps. Two entirely different issues. I did identify this as a problem in Problem #1 (I didn’t emphasise on it much but I did throw it into the title). I have no doubt ANet will be introducing content soon that will give us incentive to return (Live Story, more Ascended gear, etc). But again this is a short term problem. In the long term this current structure isn’t going to be beneficial for the game.

Putting it another way: there are 576 open world maps in the game across all servers. It should be shortened to 24.

Anyhow, would appreciate if we only discuss about what the purpose of these servers serve for PvE, and not the content itself. And as I have seen, I cannot find any purpose for split PvE servers at all.

Overall player population in NA I’d wager is too kittened high to allow one server, multiple over flows for every map is not how any sane person wants to play. Furthermore the other comment of instancing all Pve maps is asinine; please play the 1st game and you’ll see why open maps is a good idea, not to mention instancing maps would cripple the DE system.

I do feel however that player density is very low on most of the servers; it’s an issue on my current server Crystal Desert and our guilds home server FA. I think it would be beneficial to increasing player density across sparsely populated maps as well as fostering a sense of community due to increased player interaction.
As having a tighter knit community could encourage sales and active player numbers, I hope Anet gives this thread some attention.

Hahaha, blonde moment, I forgot post my whole point. I think that we should simply decrease our current number of servers in use. I won’t dare to argue by how much; I don’t work for Anet and thus don’t have access to the data that would help that.

Maybe just merge some of the emptier servers. I could see taking the bottom 10 and merging them into 3 or 4 servers.

Then again, this will be really tricky to handle, as people will lose character names and maybe guild names.

Guild and character names are universal; that is a non-issue.

Something I’ve seen mentioned a few times is an underflow map.

It would work (if I understand correctly) like an overflow map, except taking people from underpopulated maps and merging them so people end up on a map with a decent number of people.

i wouldn’t mind a server reduction. i know i play in a medium populated server that once was high populated. and i know that in wvwv we can win only when we fight with similar number populated server… tired of being outmanned

I recently came back to the game after a break and convinced a friend to get the game as well. My server Eredon Terrace is absolutely dead, PVE and leveling is incredibly lonely in a game that is supposed to be social. Please merge my server!