Guild Wars 2

In World vs. World, my server is suffering from a sever lack of a “night crew.” We tend to do quite well during the day, but once everyone has to go to bed, our opponents’ night crews log on and take over everything. It’s frustrating, especially because we once had a night crew, but they were poached by a higher tiered server. This higher tiered server even paid for everyone’s transfers. We lost 3 night time guilds because this other server was desperate to have a night crew.

The whole idea that a server requires a night crew to succeed is ridiculous. Some servers are designated North American and some are European. Yet North American servers want Europeans and Europeans want North Americans on their servers. And it’s frustrating to work so hard to gain and upgrade your battlements, only to have them handily taken with no resistance at night just because people want to go to bed. Equally frustrating is when you can stay up, but you’re just a handful of people against a horde of Europeans and Asians.

So I thought of a couple different solutions. Both of them involve establishing a server’s “night time.” That could be, say 11:00 pm to 6:00 am, sever time. Those times aren’t set in stone of course.

Solution A: Make everything worth half as many points during night hours.

Solution B: Close down the borderlands at night. Even at the latest hours, there’s usually still enough people on Eternal Battlegrounds to keep a good fight going.

If either of these are put into place, I think making server transfers free for about 1 week would allay complaints from Europeans who only came to North American servers because they were given incentives to do so.

i dont see this as a problem, its a war and you lack the army, its bad but everyone must deal with it… just hope you will move to lower tier and there wont be night guilds

Close down the boarderlands at night?! Are you high? So when it’s Midnight on the US East coast you want the NA server locked… when it’s only 9:00 p.m. on the US West coast? Midnight on the US West coast is 3:00 a.m. Eastern… WTF? Just because you’ve gone to bed doesn’t mean the rest of North America has.

MaXi.3642:

i dont see this as a problem, its a war and you lack the army, its bad but everyone must deal with it… just hope you will move to lower tier and there wont be night guilds

I still see it as a problem, since it’s not war; it’s a game. People are obligated to participate in war when it is needed. Not in a game. Anyone who wants to play WvW at night just has a bad time because they are always outmanned. In the case of my server, it doesn’t appear that we will go down a tier either, because we do quite well during the day to make up for it. In the end, it just means people on my server can’t play WvW at night and expect to have any fun. I do shift work, so sometimes I’m on until 4:00 am and other times I have to turn in before midnight. I know what it’s like in both time periods and I see all our hard-earned, fully upgraded keeps get wasted by a zerg with only 7 of us to defend commander-less.

On the flip side, I don’t expect their night crew to actually get good at the game. Frankly, they use dumb strategies and waste resources, but it works because they have numbers. They’re not getting any challenge.

One Prarie Outpost.4860:

Close down the boarderlands at night?! Are you high? Blah blah blah!

I admit solution A would be better, and probably easier to implement from a technical standpoint. The times are yet to be decided. The time doesn’t have to match spot-on when people log off, just get approximately there. I’m sure ANet has easy access to statistics on when the majority of people log off. And the fact is that a majority do log off at certain times in the Americas.

If the points were worth less at night, that doesn’t mean you can’t play. Obviously there will still be Australians, New Zealanders, people who work odd hours or don’t work, etc. on NA servers. It just means there’s less incentive to prioritize night play. The inter-server trading that’s going on, where people in odd time zones are almost literally being bought, wouldn’t be very cost-effective anymore. That’s the point.