Guild Wars 2

Vabbi has always remained one of the smallest servers, backed up by its positioning on the WvW ladders, its not surprising to hear the server is practically dead. Players are too few and far between that events cant be completed, dungeon groups are difficult to form (unless its lvl 1-3 fractals or CoF runs), spvp lobby rarely has 5 people (let alone enough to form a tournament group) and wvw is a repeating losing battle.

People are slowly disappearing from the game, or in other cases, switching over to more populated servers. Thus making the issue worse, and causing the remaining players to be stuck in a slowly deteriorating spiral.

Sadly, unlike GW1, you cannot experience alot of the game if you are playing alone. And thats how im finding myself, longing for a wider pool of players to dip into and tag along with. There’s my dilemma; I’ve made friends on vabbi, am part of the largest guild on the server which consists of around 140 players, but from witnessing overflow servers activity (which im aware dont resemble a single servers population, but there are simply not enough people on vabbi to ever get into them) and from hearing friends speaking of the greener grass, im now thinking of moving, and leaving others in the spiraling lack of hope and thus making the situation worse.

As Guild Leader of what to the best of my knowledge is the largest guild on Vabbi now, I agree this is a problem. I did submit a support ticket regarding the possibility of migrating Volition Cult [VOLT] guild influence and upgrades to another server, but was told this could not be done. (Ref: 121110-001337)

Most people in our guild agree that Vabbi is frustrating and unfun due to lack of population in WvW or World Events. Because we have a fully upgraded guild, we can not transfer without being unfairly punished we are stuck to make the best of what we can.

Its pretty clear to everyone who plays on Vabbi that the server is dead due to lack of population, so I presume you will be merging servers or closing it soon? At that point I would hope the option to migrate the guild with influence and upgrades will be available.

Its pretty rubbish that our game experiance is much less enjoyable on Vabbi server compared to any other servers because of lack of population though. It was also beyond our (players) control as we decided to play on Vabbi before launch and now months later get punished when it becomes clear the server is dead.

So yes, Vabbi is terrible. It would be amazing if ArenaNet could fix the issue through merging the server, sorting out guesting, allowing proper guild migration or perhaps making some of the end game events to be soloable on Vabbi so we can actually do them.

At present, its not possible to complete much of the content. Most World vs World point of interests and vistas are inaccessible. Many events in Orr for example are not possible.

As a counter argument for anyone who suggests the option of just changing server and joining a different guild, that is not going to happen. VOLT is a six year old community so moving to another server and guild is not a solution unless the guild and its upgrades and influence being allowed to be migrated too. Because honestly, who wants to bother grinding things more than once? Not me. Why should we have to do this when others don’t?

I’ll add my voice to this.
Even though I have started to try and convince others to come to Vabbi, I’m very much aware that, that isn’t going to happen (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/want-a-challenge-come-to-vabbi/first#post879375).

And it’s not just the WvW, but the fact that several events can’t be done. This week the major event to push into Arah worked Monday and Tuesday. And that’s a record! As the event haven’t worked for over a month. So just to do that event, people are moving away from Vabbi. Lost an ingame newly friend to it, also this week, as he wanted the Orr armour set – this he can not get on Vabbi server.

Farming is also being hit atm, the popular route of Penitent/shelters/jofast farming run are also seen as being bugged more then ever. Tree weeks ago, I meet many people (12) doing that farming run, now…I meet tree when it peaks.

A mate of mine have recently bought Guild Wars 2 and joined Vabbi server. He’s struggling to do the first events of this game, as he’s all alone. Several of the major events for immersion he simply have to skip or leave for when he’s higher level – I can’t be there helping him all the time, and I’m not supposed to do that either.

As Stone points out: most of Volition Cult [VOLT] are old community gamers, that aren’t going to leave for another server just to start over again. We bought the game in advance, we took part in the betas, and we joined in pre launch so that we could built our community here on Guild Wars 2. We’re asking for help here, as we can see that people are leaving Vabbi, leaving it empty. And we didn’t join Vabbi to be the only guild here.

Best Regards
Hill

Our guild had to face the same tough decision on Henge of Denravi. We settled there during beta and, though the community there was medium in size, things were good. However, at launch, the Titan Alliance decided to call Henge their home aswell.

Everything went fine for a time, even though wvw queues were horrid and the community deteriorated; Trolls and grievers found their way to us because we were the number 1 server in wvw at the time and servertransfers were so easy.

Then one day, TA disbanded. Guilds left the server one by one, we started losing in wvw which caused even more guilds to transfer over. In the end it was starting to become a wasteland.

We started sending out members of our guild to different servers to see which would be a good fit. We wanted a healthy community, good wvw (but not a top tier); A place where we could stay permanently. Ofcourse, once we found a server we were faced with the server always being full. Would our 200 members all be able to switch?

Luckily, when a server is “Full”, it doesnt actually mean full. It just means that there are a certain number of people currently logged in (so if you have large masses of people to transfer, try doing so at times when the population should be lowest). We did have to rebuild our complete guild infrastructure though, something that we are still working on but we are getting there.

To [VOLT]: I fully understand the wish to stay; Heck, the majority of our guild wanted to stay on Henge aswell.. we tried forging new alliances, getting guilds to join us but once the word gets out that a server is lacking in population its deathwarrant is signed.

I do not understand your comments about starting over though. You will be losing your influence and anything you have built so far, but the guild remains. Your guildmembers wont suddenly be guildless.

What would be worse?
- Having to rebuild your bank, treasure trove etc etc but finding a place for your members where they can do all the content they want to do because there is a large enough population to do so

- Keeping all your influence and guildarchitecture, but slowly losing your members to other games, different games/servers, etc because they cannot complete anything on Vabbi

All in all your argument of “why should we have to redo everything when others dont” is a moot point. Others have had to do it, why shouldnt you?

What usually happens in these cases is that the devs will merge several low-pop servers together (makes economical sense from their side too, as it means less servers to maintain and update). However, it could be anywhere from 6 months to a year before this happens, and I imagine your players do not want to be trapped in a nearly dead server for that long.

Hi guys, a few thoughts

First of I’m not leaving VOLT cos of low population. I absolutely <3 VOLT!

I’m quite sure we’re not getting Anet to make new transfer features just because we want them to

If we don’t wanna move server it leaves us with waiting for a possible server merge.

In my experience server merges can turn out to be a problem. It’s a lot of unsatisfied players put together in one basket. This might spawn negative attitude towards the game in general and people are leaving the merged server too.

On the positive side; we’re 221 player in VOLT so gaining influence will be fast.

I would love to stay with Vabbi but with the last few weeks of player leeks its starting to get really annoying. Zones 70-80 are completely dead and as you prob know its all events at this point.

(Another thing, when are we supposed to pay for transfers?)

//Roudee

I tell EVERYONE I meet to go to Vabbi, it’s been my favorite low population server for map completion and quiet farming.

A lot of servers have completely empty zones though, Vabbi’s not the only one. Sadly, there’s no real way to fix this, other than to simply merge the server with another, or find a way to get the players who are leaving to come back…

Heya my fellow vabbi players

On-topic: I think anet monitors the activity of all servers, so if they think that some of them are draining too much, they will adjust by mergeing servers.
One problem is judgeing when the servers are lowpopulated, as events might show a different population than every day. It might even vary a lot between daytimes/different days of the weeks/month… and that with different pattern for different servers. With free servertransfers still up each week (as we still dont have the guestfunction), i dont belive the serverpopulations are anywhere near stable. Communities evolve, that takes more than three month…

Off-topic: We really should have a forumsection for each server…

I have been on vabbi since day one and i like it here. 99% of the chat i read was mature and civil, most of the players i played with were laid-back and relaxed (no bad words after failing a dungeon for 40 minutes for example).

I use to take my time to watch other players before putting them on my fl, so there is only a handful of players i “know” yet (as well as some of our nightcrewe wvwvwers, i happened to play along more than once). But i like the overal attitude here, as i said most people i actualy talked with or read their talk were friendly and helpful.

I enjoy a more familiar and smaller server, without queues and the chance to run into the same players more often. But i can understand the desire to play with a more stable and higher population too.

If you want to earn yourself a name (as a clan or an individual) you have better chances doing so on a lowpopulated server (and imho its more rewarding).

I have not logged in since the “one time” event (did the demolition asura finally move his a**? or was vabbi one of the servers that never finished the event? Things like this do make a hughe group of players on these servers unhappy and when you hear others finished the “one-time” event several times, getting multipe rewards, that are in some cases worth a lot of grind/gems…).
Since then i spend my little sparetime reading the forums finding out whats going on. First to hear about the event issues, then realizing powercreep has come to gw2 (its MY definition of powercreep ofc).
And the more i read, the more puzzled i become about how badly i misinterpreted anet and the manifesto.

Well motivation to login is down for me atm, as much stuff i still wanted to do in gw2, all the glorious fights i wanted to fight – not now. I first need to find out why i have been that stupid…
I dont want to spoil the fun for anyone, this is my personal issue. So for all of you:

Good luck, nice drops and have fun.

I agree with most of the above, and would probably end up repeating many points. I have been in Vabbi since day 1 and it has it feels like home. Everywhere I go I tend to bump into the same faces which is what I like (both from within my guild and out). Therefore it is hard for me to leave because I feel for every one person that leaves, the situation gets worse. It’s a shame that Anet allowed all these free transfers, because the server started off great.

I hope something happens and soon, for all of the above issues raised.

Hi guys.
I completely agree that we are having a big problem on Vabbi. For all the reasons mentioned above. We have internal discussion in the guild switching server. Which means another active guild gone, we feel bad but we also want to play the game.

What I would like to hear from A-net is a time frame. When can we expect something to be done about this situation?

There is no way we are going to wait longer than a month, there is just too much dissatisfaction and constant minor annoyances. We want to stay, because we really love the people playing on Vabbi. You are all so nice and helpful. It’s going to feel bad leaving everybody behind, but it’s going to happen sooner rather than later.