Guild Wars 2

I am going to create a seriously long post here which mostly is a copy/paste from a reply I did in another thread in the WvW section. Edited though.

I will propose a SERIOUSLY outrageous solution at the end of my post.

Let’s start off by defining the current problem:
– Imbalance of servers because of Free Transfers
– Bandwagonning (casual players transferring to winning servers on the drop of a dime)
– 24/7 WvW BUT timezone appointed servers (EU/NA)
– Seperate language servers (DE/ES/FR)
– Casual players outnumber Hardcore players
– NA players are reluctant to leave NA servers, EU players are reluctant to leave EU servers
– Being almost 3 months down the line and no real solution was created by ANet OR by its players

If you combine all of the above you get the following:
– Nightcapping makes guilds leave their timezone
– Some servers get a decent 24 hour force
– Other servers get crushed due to not having such a force
– Casual players want to win, so they leave for the winning servers or stop playing
– Insane population imbalance
– Other server will try to recruit other timezone forces however its hard to recruit if you have been losing people and matchups with a 200-300k difference.

There no longer is a proper solution for this problem.

Stop free transfers?
WvW will be stuck in its current state and die because of insane imbalance

Merge serverpools as they are right now?
You will still have the bandwagonning of casual players to winning servers creating massive queues and other servers becoming ghost towns.

Limited transfers (what we have now)?
Absolutely useless, the only thing it does is make the current guilds that are on losing servers decide to leave faster before they have to pay for a transfer.

Force English on Language specific servers?
It’s too late for that now.. Why create them in the first place considering if you wanted to make a worldwide competitive game? English is the “worldwide language" of choice make it that and let all the people that don’t speak it find eachother through forums. No-one is going to go to a fully DE server now if they don’t speak DE.. But DE WILL go to a EN server if they know there are a bunch of DE guilds on it. In the example above you can ofcourse exchange DE with ES/FR.

The only way ANet could have created a proper 24/7 wargame right of the bat is if they (in my opinion):
– Created one big serverpool (there would have been a bigger spread of nationalities and timezones to begin with and thus already deleting a big part of the “night/morningcapping” stuff..)
– ALL servers would be EN (non-EN would find eachother anyway)
– Limited transferring (like a max of 5 free transfers OR once per 1/2/3 months)

The following suggestion is bold and will really really really make the current winning servers angry, however I feel that they are a minority compared to the rest AND the simple fact that you (ANet) intended WvW as a worldwide competitive part of GW2, which in its current state it simply isn’t.
I’m not saying the “wait and see” approach which is used now won’t work in the long run (6-12 months from now) however I think you (ANet) will lose a huge amount of players if you let that happen. Which brings me to my current (rather outrageous) solution.

Outrageous solution as promised:

- Recreate WvW alltogether
– Tell players they will have to assign themselves to a new server in starting (let’s say) December 1st 2012.
– Create a single worldwide serverpool (no EU/NA tags, no language specific tags)
– Let people talk to eachother on forums and whatnot to try and create as much of a 24 hour force or atleast make an informed decision
– After the big switch transfers should be immediately limited to once per month or a fixed amount of free transfers, people had the chance to make an informed decision. Now live with it and make it work.

What I think/hope this will create is:
– PvE players on PvE servers with casual WvW
– PvP players on PvP server with competitive WvW
– WvW players on WvW players with hardcore WvW
– FINALLY ridding yourself (ANet) of this timezone issue
– FINALLY ridding yourself (ANet) of masses crying about night/morningcapping
– FINALLY ridding yourself (ANet) of bandwagonning and thus crying over queues

I KNOW this is a completely outrageous sollution to the issue, but in my opinion a complete table flip of the system is the only way to solve it. Creating a null point from which we restart everything as best as humanly possible.
People have played this game now and have seen how much fun it can be, now let them imagine how much fun it can be if they can recreate it by communication and forging alliances.

I also know that this needs further tweaking but this is my suggestion and how ever bold it may be I think it’s the right one.

Let’s start off by defining the current problem:
– Imbalance of servers because of Free Transfers
What’s the problem here? Bigger numbers and huge queues on high ranking servers? Lower numbers and smaller queues on low ranking servers. Competition that evens out except in a few borderline brackets? It’s fine.

– Bandwagonning (casual players transferring to winning servers on the drop of a dime)
Again, what’s the real problem here? They’re not causing any harm to the game, just filing up servers and leaving others alone.

– 24/7 WvW BUT timezone appointed servers (EU/NA) All servers run on server time, which is set to Pacific. People play at different times of the day regardless of what time zone their in anyway. I’m hiding from a hurricane at some family’s house in Colorado as I type this at 4:AM.

– Seperate language servers (DE/ES/FR)
There’s 192 countries on the planet, with more languages than I can count. They can somehow mostly compete in the olympics, how can we not figure out how to point and click on the same pixels...

– Casual players outnumber Hardcore players
How exactly is this a problem, or will it be solved or changed, ever? Target audience = me, with my 60-80 hour a week job, and huge amount of expendable cash.

– NA players are reluctant to leave NA servers, EU players are reluctant to leave EU servers
I’m a natural New York player, playing on a EU server when Henge of Denravi gets too full for the holidays. I have no problem going to EU servers, and I know for a fact that I’ve met more people who at least claim to be non-US players on HoD than actual US players.

– Being almost 3 months down the line and no real solution was created by ANet OR by its players. It’s been two months, two days, three hours, and eight minutes by my clock.

@Nels, serious question: did you even play WvW yet?

Yup. Got my 500 badges waiting for a legendary bow that doesn’t have flowers, unicorns, butterfly wings, or rainbows.

It’s seriously not that bad. Maybe you’re just on the wrong server.

Mh, you just said that you cannot be on the wrong server, didn’t you? I guess you’re on one of those winning servers then, which quite explains the reply.

Actually, Vabbi. We’re a very bottom ranked European server, with a very low population. And Henge of Denravi, a very top ranked, until a while ago, American server, with a very high population.

I’m hiding in Vabbi right now, due to the huge amount of stupid that Halloween brought to the game. I intend to go back to my losing American server as soon as things calm down. I’ve also gone to a number of other servers for at least a day or two, in my quest for un-bugged skill challenges and events early on, so I could get world completion.

Have you ever actually been around, or have you been on your one server the entire time?

Nels the Cornwhisperer.8025:

Let’s start off by defining the current problem:
– Imbalance of servers because of Free Transfers
1)What’s the problem here? Bigger numbers and huge queues on high ranking servers? Lower numbers and smaller queues on low ranking servers. Competition that evens out except in a few borderline brackets? It’s fine.

– Bandwagonning (casual players transferring to winning servers on the drop of a dime)
2)Again, what’s the real problem here? They’re not causing any harm to the game, just filing up servers and leaving others alone.

– 24/7 WvW BUT timezone appointed servers (EU/NA)
3)All servers run on server time, which is set to Pacific. People play at different times of the day regardless of what time zone their in anyway. I’m hiding from a hurricane at some family’s house in Colorado as I type this at 4:AM.

– Seperate language servers (DE/ES/FR)
4)There’s 192 countries on the planet, with more languages than I can count. They can somehow mostly compete in the olympics, how can we not figure out how to point and click on the same pixels…

– Casual players outnumber Hardcore players
5)How exactly is this a problem, or will it be solved or changed, ever? Target audience = me, with my 60-80 hour a week job, and huge amount of expendable cash.

– NA players are reluctant to leave NA servers, EU players are reluctant to leave EU servers
6)I’m a natural New York player, playing on a EU server when Henge of Denravi gets too full for the holidays. I have no problem going to EU servers, and I know for a fact that I’ve met more people who at least claim to be non-US players on HoD than actual US players.

– Being almost 3 months down the line and no real solution was created by ANet OR by its players.
7)It’s been two months, two days, three hours, and eight minutes by my clock.

You are replying to my initial post with the complete wrong mindset.

1) ANet meant to make WvW an international competitive 24/7 game. It currently isn’t due to people who lose simply leave. Or most NA servers missing nighttime coverage and EU servers missing nighttime coverage, this all because of the NA/EU tags that made NA players go to NA and EU players go to EU. Competition isn’t evening out anything, the current system rewards being a coward and running to a winning server.

The current servers that currently DO have overseas nighttime coverage have gotten that coverage due to a big transfer which made matchups lopsided (check EU brackets history).

2) This is the worst reaction possible. Bandwagonning destroys competitive WvW. There is 0 fighting spirit and winning servers will die because of insane Queues. Bandwagonning due to free transfers is a BIG problem to WvW.

3) This is a combined problem due to ANet tagging servers with NA/EU. You seem to miss that point. EU players will not care about server time, they care about their own time. Same goes for NA.

4) Again you seem to miss the point. Creating DE/ES/FR servers created segregation that will completely destroy 24/7 competitive WvW play because most of the DE/ES/FR servers simply cannot create a 24/7 competitive crew. By now I feel you are completely clueless btw.

5) Casual players run from a fight and eagerly join the winning side if there is nothing holding them back (FREE TRANSFERS). Hardcore players stand their ground and fight for their server. This has nothing to do with your fancy job, I work 50-60 hours per week myself and still consider myself a hardcore player because I simply won’t drop my server when things go south.

6) You are a single person. EU servers have been trying for weeks to get NA guilds to come fill up timeslots and NA guilds have been trying for weeks to get EU guilds to fill up timeslots. Both have failed most of the time. It’s not strange for NA players to feel more at home on NA servers and EU players to feel more at home on EU servers. Take those tags away and we might actually become international and there won’t be any barriers keeping people from mingling.

7) Yes cause the beta doesn’t count and the week head start doesn’t count.

This might sound like I’m flaming you, but I feel you skimmed my post and went “LOL”. You are looking at my points from a completely wrong perspective. My perspective:
ANet created WvW to be a 24/7 worldwide war. BUT created barriers to prevent it from being international (EU/NA tags, language specific servers and so on).

Try to look at it from that angle.

Have you ever ran to a winning server? I’ll tell you this: I got most of my 500 marks in the losing, low population servers, where the queues aren’t hours long. No matter what you do, unless you permanently lock all server transfers, a large amount of people will *always* run to the winning team. The NA/EU tags do not mean anything, as I know in my bracket right now, there’s more Americans on one server than EU players.

As for the language thing, Vizunah Square, a FR server, was long listed as the #1 EU server, and is still #2.

Casual players are still on Henge of Denravi. Hardcore players, of Titan Alliance, are the ones that all left. Go figure.

I’m seriously pretty sure I’ve been on a wide enough number of different servers to know that it really is working out just fine.

If you count heastart, add three days. If you count betas, why not count previews we got from years ago? No, live is the moment it goes live to the public.

You’re looking at WvW all wrong. I quote Matt Witter "WvW was developed as a never ending continuous battle." It doesn’t say worldwide. It doesn’t say international. Right now, it’s continuous, and only ends for a couple minutes a week. I

I feel like I’m arguing with a wall but here goes. No I have never ran to a winning server. I started on Desolation and went to Far Shiverpeaks because I had friends from other MMO’s there.
I proposed changing the Transfers to once per 1/2/3 months. That would definately discourage bandwagonning.

NA/EU tags mean a LOT. I don’t know how you don’t seem to understand this. I would dare to say that atleast 90% of the people living in the EU chose for a EU server simply because it said EU. Same goes for NA. I don’t know what server you are on but you seem to be clueless to most of it.

Vizunah Square isn’t going to stay Nr1 for long due to the simple fact that they only have a nightforce that consists of FRENCH people. Desolation (currently in that matchup) has a rather big US presence as of 2 weeks because RUIN gaming transferred there with enough members to fill 5 guilds.

You are trying to use the HoD argument but are using it wrong. As I recall HoD got a horrible name due to excessive hacking/exploiting so people ran as far as they could from that server to make sure they didn’t end up with a bad rep.

If you can browse these forums, react and post with a mindset and arguments like you have you clearly are uninformed or simply trolling. WvW isn’t fine apart from a small number of servers the rest are slowly dying due to a lot of issues I mentioned.

Last month BETA access is all I took along because it really mattered and was fairly easy to get into. I don’t know why you are making such a big deal out of this unless you really just feel like arguing semantics.

IF Anet decided to make WvW a never ending continuous battle AND they decided to split up server groups in EU/NA than they should have kept EU WvW to EU players and NA WvW to NA players. They opened doors letting NA players go to EU WvW and vice versa which inevitably destroyed any kind of balance.
You cannot expect WvW to NOT be international if everyone is allowed to play everywhere, this isn’t rocket science.

Same.4687:

5) Casual players run from a fight and eagerly join the winning side if there is nothing holding them back (FREE TRANSFERS). Hardcore players stand their ground and fight for their server.

That’s not entirely correct imo, what usually happens (just happened to Riverside) is that at least one of the big WvW guilds leaves, to Elona in this case iirc as they were hit hard by Vizunah’s night shift. The casuals usually stay for a while until they notice that things get worse, then an increasing number of them follows to the new server until there are just too many of them and the better players switch again. Vicious circle.
So if “hardcore” means efficiency, these are the first players that switch. If hardcore means “honor” and to be proud of your server, you stay.

I might have had to define “Hardcore”. Hardcore how I use it is server pride etc. Not hardcore as in “Would do anything to win”.

In the case of language specific servers I can actually quite understand that hardcore DE player will group up on 1 server to create the best DE server there is. Because in your case it’s DEvsWvsW in my opinion.

It’s not DE only on DE servers. Quite a lot of english speaking americans I know on a lot of them. And Vizunah, which is FR.

Anyway, Hardcore gamers, with server pride, are casuals. Besides, there’s only what, 199 slots in WvW. I’m pretty sure any server that has a population that wants to spend the gold/karma/influence/time on winning WvW, is doing so.