The initial and primary aim of this thread is not to advertise Gunnar’s Hold as the place to transfer to. It is not a cry ‘we need more people’ or the like, nor is it an attempt to paint an idealised picture of this server.
You may be interested in joining a new server – or you may know someone who is; you may have been considering Gunnar’s Hold as your new home. I understand that the factor which might allow you to make an educated decision is abundance of information about the parts crucial for any server. This thread will answer some of your early questions; if you’d like to ask about anything not covered, feel most welcome to pm me over the forum or catch me in-game.
Those not looking at GH as their potential new haven still might find the following bits of information interesting or even useful.
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Queues
I’ve been taking in-game screenshots of queues for over a week now.
You can see our recent queues for yourself here: http://imgur.com/a/YeA2F
Screens were taken at various hours, pretty much across the whole day. My current local time is always present on the minimap and is set to GMT+2 (Central European Time on daylight savings). You can also see our score evolution and relative tick at different hours.
The gist of our queue status is as follows:
- our primetime starts around 7pm GMT (currently 8pm UK and 9pm Central EU time due to daylight savings);
- queues during primetime outside of the reset are about 0~30 people, which roughly translates to 5~15 minutes of waiting tops, often no waiting time whatsoever;
- queues on the reset night reached 40 to GH map and 100 to EB, but both enemy borderlands were ready to join with no queues about 90 minutes into the reset night;
- there are occassional queues to EB during offpeak, related to open mic events held on our TS.
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General WvW organisation
Gunnar’s Hold has players from across the whole globe, but we do not have any American, Asian, or Oceanic guilds. Our offpeak consists of dedicated individual players and commanders. Due to our high-silver position on the ladder, this means that GH struggles during mornings and afternoons against servers which do have any non-EU population, aka most of them. It also means that every single EU-offpeak player would not only be able to make a difference, but also wouldn’t be fighting just NPCs. There is little room for PvD against our common opponents.
We are making use of several cross-guild projects i like to call ‘system guilds’, which act as extended friendlists helping to manage our assets. We have one such system guild organising afternoon raids and open mic WvW events, for example.
Our primetime consists of guild groups with little to no zerging outside of EB. GH guilds understand and respect both the idea of separate guild raids and the need to join forces when it really arises.
The current cost to transfer onto GH is 1400 gems. We are against sponsoring any guilds or individuals to faciliate their transfer costs and never made any community-wide exceptions.
The commonly shared view is that we play for fun rather than points, which translates into low-to-medium interest in PPT across the board. It does not mean that we will neglect a besieged keep; it does mean, however, that we will not pull off all-nighters just to catch up in virtual points. We feel comfortable in high-silver and do not intend to push it into the gold league or its future equivalent.
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General server organisation
We are making extensive use of our community-built server site – http://www.gunnars-hold.eu/
Gunnar’s Hold is also housing its own TS3 server open to each and every server resident. Besides guild channels, we also make use of map-specific ones. The activity on community TS3 server peaks at about 300 unique users each night (+/-20, sometimes even more). There still are some guilds and packs of friends using their own VoIP servers, however most have migrated onto the community one by now.
The only commonly shared expectation from any new members of the server is to be polite and cooperative, understanding that there already is an existing structure and modus operandi in place. We are always happy to reevaluate our approaches, but trying to introduce a new order from the get go, with no respect to the current server residents, will not work; GH is not a barren, empty land awaiting for anyone to civilise it.
As such, it is only in the best tone to show good manners and say hi on the site. Everyone will be welcomed, and given a chance and a place among the community regulars.
You will find little to no drama on GH. As they say – the only drama you will be affected by is the one you brought with yourself.
(edited by drkn.3429)
