Guild Wars 2

This isn’t a whine “my server is dead” thread however my server is headed that way. Server populations need to be addressed sooner than later or the repercussions are going to be more permanent.

I’m sure you’ve seen the “I want to transfer to TC” threads and the like, but those are just the first signs of imbalanced populations. People want to move and play on more active servers for obvious reasons. Because of this, the amount of transfers, guests, or people that are just simply quitting is going to be happening at a much higher rate.

The players that are most affected by this are the people who enjoy:

• WvW
• Dungeons (and don’t use gw2lfg.com)
• Open World PvE
• New Players – New players will generally not want to play on a low population server and may not give the game a chance if they feel that it is already dying.

What’s being done right now is that paid transfers(via gem$$) are adjusted based on the population of the server you are transferring to. I don’t think that this is enough because some people(especially new players) may not want to spend the gems or have the gold to transfer. There are no incentives whatsoever to move to a lower population server at this time.

The population listed in the server window is extremely vague and the general population does not know what these metrics are based off of. Right now on NA servers we can only see “High”, “Very High”, and “Full”. No doubt that the full servers are actually seeing a healthy amount of activity but the others may not. These metrics don’t mean anything to the general population because we have no idea what they’re based off of: Monhtly/Weekly/Daily logins, “active” accounts, total accounts, current number of active players? Sometimes I wonder if Anet has a complete idea of their own metrics or are purposely hiding them for some reason.

This issue in its current state is not being addressed. I’ve played games where they have waited too long to merge servers/populations or create incentives for players to transfer. If the players have already decided that the game is a sinking ship then they will just cease to play altogether and this can happen at a rapid rate. This is a modern day MMO, and GW2 is not immune to this effect in the way that GW1 was.

Perhaps Anet is holding back on doing something because they are benefiting from the paid(gem$$) transfers and creating a source of profit from that. If this is the case I would assume that the loss of potential income of new players joining the game and continuing to play or current players enjoying the game and buying gems would be greater than the amount they would receive from paid transfers.

The other option would be that Anet simply does not know what to do yet and is working on it. It’s possible that Anet doesn’t have the right metrics or even know how to analyze or handle them. Maybe they’re working on some incentives that wouldn’t be too imbalanced? Maybe the guesting system is a wrench in the process? I can only speculate here but my best guess is that they’re just unsure of how to handle it or are unaware of the severity of the population issues some servers are having.

TL;DR Server population needs to be addressed soon and is Anet holding back on purpose or unaware?

Unfortunately there isn’t much ArenaNet can do about this problem, as it lies with the players and not with the population itself.

Players play when, how and where they want to. There could easily be a full realm where the actual world itself is dead simply because the players only wanted to stand in Rata Sum.

A great example is World of Warcraft. WoW claims to have 7 million subscribers, yet the servers will be merged in the next patch because most of them are completely dead.

Hopefully the mega-server in Elder Scrolls Online will be good enough that it will be a must for other MMOs to have. There already is an overflow system in GWII so why we have so many realms instead of just a few massive realms with lots of overflow systems is beyond me.

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Unfortunately there isn’t much ArenaNet can do about this problem, as it lies with the players and not with the population itself.

Players play when, how and where they want to. There could easily be a full realm where the actual world itself is dead simply because the players only wanted to stand in Rata Sum.

A great example is World of Warcraft. WoW claims to have 7 million subscribers, yet the servers will be merged in the next patch because most of them are completely dead.

Hopefully the mega-server in Elder Scrolls Online will be good enough that it will be a must for other MMOs to have. There already is an overflow system in GWII so why we have so many realms instead of just a few massive realms with lots of overflow systems is beyond me.

I think with the right incentives and/or server merges that happen in a timely fashion can alleviate the population issues without creating the “sinking ship” MMO phenomenon.

One massive server with world representation (similar to guild representation) would be an excellent shift that wouldn’t break WvW. Charge gems to switch world representation just as you would transfers. Stop naming overflow overflow and just have it #’d instances as with GW1.

They need an “underflow” system. I’m sure this has been mentioned plenty of times in other threads. Overflow occurs when a certain population threshold is reached on a map. There should be a system in place that merges maps together when the population is below a certain threshold.

That’s a great word for it^ & function. Might be difficult to pull off though.

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We need right now, is more accurate Population POLLING at the transfer screen.

Anet’s cooking the numbers by apparently only using Peak Value Logins or something lame. You can tell b/c every single server shows the same exact population @ 5pm Primetime that it shows at 5am in the morning. That’s a big fat lie and they need to stop big fat lying about it (just to keep their stupid Gem costs up on Transfers)

ilr.9675:

That’s a great word for it^ & function. Might be difficult to pull off though.

.

We need right now, is more accurate Population POLLING at the transfer screen.

Anet’s cooking the numbers by apparently only using Peak Value Logins or something lame. You can tell b/c every single server shows the same exact population @ 5pm Primetime that it shows at 5am in the morning. That’s a big fat lie and they need to stop big fat lying about it (just to keep their stupid Gem costs up on Transfers)

That was basically one of my suspicions about it.

Xenon.4537:

They need an “underflow” system. I’m sure this has been mentioned plenty of times in other threads. Overflow occurs when a certain population threshold is reached on a map. There should be a system in place that merges maps together when the population is below a certain threshold.

Welcome to WoW’s CRZ (Cross Realm Zone) if that was to be so.

The solution here is to delete servers. There is simply too many of them. WvW wise it is impossible to have good WvW battles week after week if only the top two or three tiers ever have populations to do anything with them.

Indeed it is so…

The main problem with population imbalance concerns WvW. Any other content can be done via guesting.

If you play dungeons, there isn’t an issue. You can play cross server.

If you PvE, you can guest to any server and join in the fun with whoever you want.

Honestly, part of the problem is with each new Living Story release, they funnel mass amounts of players to a certain area. This makes the maps even more bare elsewhere.

They are not spreading the people out to the maps like the initially said they would like to do. In fact, maps are becoming even bigger ghost towns because of the new content.

I wish that all open world PvE zones were on one server with districts. Main towns/wvw can stay on individual servers as needed.

I’m not sure why GW moved away from districts. I thought it was a great idea in GW1. You could literally see everyone else who played the game.

gw1 had a cool district system
like so many things, gw2 threw it away to make room for more “mmo” features

Mad Rasputin.7809:

The main problem with population imbalance concerns WvW. Any other content can be done via guesting.

If you play dungeons, there isn’t an issue. You can play cross server.

If you PvE, you can guest to any server and join in the fun with whoever you want.

I agree about WvW, however new people may not know about guesting or using gw2lfg.com to find dungeon groups. If you start playing the game on a “high” population server then realize it’s almost barren in most of the zones, you might give up on the game.

milo.6942:

gw1 had a cool district system
like so many things, gw2 threw it away to make room for more “mmo” features

Districts might be ok if they allowed more than 20 people in a single instance.

The thing is, if you’re not factoring in WvW, guesting is perfectly viable and SOLVES the problem. No one is bound to their server unless they’re stubborn or lazy.

You can guest to any busier server, without transferring. I don’t see this is an issue (though I do love the underflow idea).

Waiting for ANet to make a big technological advancement and dynamically populate areas based on a system similar to districts in Guild Wars, where as the population rose the amount of server space dedicated to different persistent instances of that zone increased (or decreased). Prioritization for assigning players to a particular instance, active server, district, or whatever people want to call it, would need to be populated by putting people with commonalities into the same play instance. These commonalities would include Party, GuildID, Mutually Friended, etc. Given the way overflow works, I would think they are well on their way to being able to do something like this. Imagine having the numerous zones of each server all playing together to make the popluation of each area something more substantial, instead of the deadzones they are.

If you want to hit me up with your architecture and some other relavent documentation ANet, I’d be happy to look into coming up with a test plan for something like this :P

The root of the problem is the fact that players aren’t given enough information to even make well-educated guesses.

Perhaps if anet stopped holding back information, real problems could come to light and they can be addressed better.

Mad Rasputin.7809:

If you play dungeons, there isn’t an issue. You can play cross server.

There’s been a lot more desynchs in cross server dungeon groups.
We’ve exited the dungeon to bring new people in or start a new path but then half of them can’t get back in again. It’s not as bad as it was around release, but it’s still happening when trying to cross-server.

Unleashed.6195:

One massive server with world representation (similar to guild representation) would be an excellent shift that wouldn’t break WvW. Charge gems to switch world representation just as you would transfers. Stop naming overflow overflow and just have it #’d instances as with GW1.

I like this idea. And the underflow suggestion.

Zacchary.6183:

The root of the problem is the fact that players aren’t given enough information to even make well-educated guesses.

Perhaps if anet stopped holding back information, real problems could come to light and they can be addressed better.

I agree here, yea people would be upset to find what ever truths might be lurking but at least things could be addressed, as it is now everyone has no clue. so nothing can or will be done.

Vayne.8563:

The thing is, if you’re not factoring in WvW, guesting is perfectly viable and SOLVES the problem. No one is bound to their server unless they’re stubborn or lazy.

You can guest to any busier server, without transferring. I don’t see this is an issue (though I do love the underflow idea).

But I did mention WvW. What are they going to do about that?

Doesn’t matter anyways, it got moved to the suggestions forum to die.