Guild Wars 2

Why are there topics demanding server mergers, demanding a shorter transfer limitation, and saying “this game is dying” and “people are leaving”?

From what I see…the game is growing, significantly. There’s a lot of players I see every day, and the game is just getting started. I’m expecting to see more growth come the Nov 15th patch and post-Christmas.

What would grandma rather get little Jimmy for Christmas: a $15-a-month 7-yr old game plus all expansions costing nearly $120, or a subscription free GW2 for $60 one-time box cost? That’s an easy choice for them to make.

My server and guild has been growing. Sure, there are those people that rushed content and left after the first month (even my guild had a few), but they’re replaced by casuals, new players, and long-term players.

I think this game needs more servers added. Not only should it add more servers, but it should do a commercial around Thanksgiving to get more public awareness. Do it! Please and thank you!

I wonder about that “Full” tag sometimes. My server is one of the ones that’s always Full, but there are lots of zones I go to that are nearly empty. Yeah, the Orr zones are fairly crowded, but not enough to offset all the empty ones I see.

is borlis pass listed as high? XD

reminds me of when swtor servers were listing themselves as high. heh.

The game isn’t dying. Just that the lower level zones are pretty empty except during prime time on weekends. A majority of the player population got to level 80 pretty fast and most are bored with the game, farming the lvl 75-80 zones (Orr or Strait of Devastation) for $$$, doing pvp full time or simply not interested in making ALTs leaving the lower level zones pretty empty.

Go ingame and try to find all the players that actually make the cap “full”, or “high”. It seems to be the total number of characters per server or in that servers database, rather than the amount of people actually online at any given time.

I think Full pertains to the amount of players on the server, whether they have logged in or not is a different thing. I would assume a server could say “full” and only have 250 people logged in at peak times.

Devona’s Rest was pretty active yesterday in the Norn 1-15 zone. For every event, there were two or 3 players, and for the hard hitting elites, there were 5-10 people to take them down. Fun times.

Cheers.

I suspect the number of players required for a server to list itself as “Full” is a much different number now than it was in the first few weeks.

Renegadeimp.8439:

Go ingame and try to find all the players that actually make the cap “full”, or “high”. It seems to be the total number of characters per server or in that servers database, rather than the amount of people actually online at any given time.

Very much am able to find most of those players: tons in Lion’s Arch (overflows and normal), Orr has quite a large number of them, Frostgorge Sound is also filled with players. Then, there’s the players in sPvP (I don’t count them normally, but they are players of the server that are online. Also, there’s those players in WvW, of which there’s a few thousand. In the lower zones, I run across 1-3 players per each heart I come across. Also, this past week I have yet to do a single jumping puzzle without at least one other player trying to attempt it as well (few great conversations and new friends, as well as new people to recruit).

I’m sorry, but I’m trying to understand where people are saying this game is “dead” or “dying”; everything I see is contrary to that claim. As for the starting zones, which is a 1-15 zone and only takes a few hours to complete, I would never expect them to be populated heavily at all 2 months post launch (especially considering there are 5 of them).

Yeah I also believe Full might pertain to total characters in server rather then online. Crystal desert always full but lower levels zones feel empty, except on weekends. However considering the size of the world, plus dungeons and WvW and Pvp there is a lot of places people can be.

Just because the server says “full” that ALL zones will be packed… keep in mind how long the game has been out… most of everyone is probably lvl 80 and already in the high end zones farming, etc… or doing all the dungeons for tokens.

There is a simple test to determine if ‘full’ means concurrent users (people online at the same time) or total number of accounts that the server has regardless of their online status.

That test is this: Do server populations drop over the course of time?

If they do, then it cannot be counting the total number of accounts since this number would never go down. When people stop playing they stop playing they do not delete their account.

Ah! But maybe the system only counts the number of ‘active’ accounts within the past week. Okay, but if this were the case then population numbers wouldn’t change on a daily basis plus an upwards change of population would indicate an influx of new players.

But, if you watch the server population levels you will see that they change based on the time of the day. During the ‘peak’ hours many servers are full. During quiet times these same servers will drop down to ‘high’ or even ‘medium’ which indicates that the population level is based on how many users are on at the same time.

Now, this doesn’t indicate what number is used to determine ‘high’ population or ‘full’ population. For all we know, it’s 10 users online which means ‘high’ and 11 users online which changes it to ‘full.’

As to the low level zone thing: All games based on a level framework have this issue. WoW, at it’s prime, had empty low level zones. When the majority of players are at the max level or near to it then the lower level zones will be empty. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t playing the game it just means that they aren’t playing in -those- locations.

If you want to find the majority of players go to the high to max level zones, go to SPVP, go to WvWvW, go to Lion’s Arch, or go to the dungeons.

The population rating is based on players currently online. Anet made a comment after the 2nd or 3rd BWE that they could easily change the server capacities on the fly.

Consider the scenario:
servers are designed for about 7k players. Unexpected launch flood made them increase that cap to 10k, so now servers are at higher capacity than designed. Now things have settled down, other big name games have come out, people have gotten burnt out and are taking a break…so they lower the cap again to 7k. But servers that were full still have 10k+ people with characters there that will be coming back on and off and the server could see a surge for holidays and expansions. So instead of putting those servers with high populations and huge potential populations back at the default…they set it a 4-5k to keep it listed as perpetually full in order to funnel new players and encourage transfers to lower population servers. When populations balance themselves out with one another, and players cant willy nilly transfer…they are all put back down to the default 7k for new players and paid transfers.

…that’s what I think is going on. /put on tinfoil hat

How many of those are bot accounts i wonder. WvW is already getting queues where 40 bots or more are sucking up slots in borderlands.

Add that to the 40 or so in each zone and thats a check of a lot of “active characters”.

what happened to the 25th US server?

HykCraft.4610:

Just because the server says “full” that ALL zones will be packed… keep in mind how long the game has been out… most of everyone is probably lvl 80 and already in the high end zones farming, etc… or doing all the dungeons for tokens.

Or stopped playing the game because it is boring.

I belive alot of people stop playing already, but they are replaced, if there wasn’t alot of people who stoped playing then with the new players coming every day the servers would be all crashed.

What I feel it changed in the game I feel a bit alone, even with alot of people arround me, but they just passing by.

Max Lexandre.6279:

I belive alot of people stop playing already, but they are replaced, if there wasn’t alot of people who stoped playing then with the new players coming every day the servers would be all crashed.

What I feel it changed in the game I feel a bit alone, even with alot of people arround me, but they just passing by.

Replaced by who? LMAO that’s why their box sales haven’t grown much since after a month of launch and sorry but there is no way new people come close the number of people who stopped playing. Servers are dead. I would say over half. I am on a heavily populated server and see no one. Made a new toon to see if even anyone was in the starter zone and it was empty.

It seems to me that the server status depends (at least to some degree) on active players. I have seen a few threads by people, wanting to be on the same server as friends, who were unable to create an account on a server during peak hours but were able to create one during off-peak hours.

I am not having problems with empty zones on my server. Yesterday, running my daily achievements in Bloodtide Coast, I triggered the Alpha Drake event and anonounced it on map chat. I had 5 to 10 players join me within a minute. For obvious reasons the low level zones are less populated now than they were right after release, when everyone was in the 5 racial starting areas.

Well until we get numbers that show what it takes to make a server appear as “full” we will never know. It could take like 100 players to make it say full for all we know…

The game is doing exceptionally well, as far as I’m concerned. I play on Tarnished Coast and there’s never a shortage of players in pretty much any zone I venture to. If you don’t see anyone around, ask in map chat if anyone wants to team up.

Guesting will help some issues. The problem is like all MMO games, higher lvl areas will have the largest concentration of players. So get used to low lvl zones thinning out, they can’t completely fix that. Deal with it.

the game is growing, there’s no denying that. people asking for merging are misunderstanding the problem: players arent leaving the game, theyre just concentrated in certain areas of the game, primarily Orr, WvW and dungeons.

Orr needs to be nerfed and the rest of the world rewards need to get buffed so that people have an excuse to spread out. hoping to see some significant changes soon.

Garenthal.1480:

The game is doing exceptionally well, as far as I’m concerned. I play on Tarnished Coast and there’s never a shortage of players in pretty much any zone I venture to. If you don’t see anyone around, ask in map chat if anyone wants to team up.

I’ve been trying to get on TC for a while now but it’s always full. People who say the game is dying are on the wrong server. I’ve been on HoD since the headstart and I really want to move to a server with a bit more activity in areas other than LA. Even Cursed Shore is now empty. I used to see packs of 15+ running events and now I’ll be lucky to see 3. We haven’t held a temple for more than an hour since Halloween started. I doubt I will ever see my last piece of Karma gear.

I hear TC has an amazing community as well. HoD has more than its fair share of doomsayers and snobs.

it lists borlis pass as high.

all the proof i need to know that they’ve lowered the threshholds on the population ratings.

Instant EB queues Jade Quarry all day everyday…

20-30 Spvp servers running. Remember when it was 200?

edit – these forums sure are moving slow now-a-days..

bcbully.7289:

Instant EB queues Jade Quarry all day everyday…

20-30 Spvp servers running. Remember when it was 200?

edit – these forums sure are moving slow now-a-days..

There is more to the game than WvW and sPvP.

And these forums always moved fairly slow. I assume it was due to most of the community going to fan sites since this forum wasn’t open until after release.

Bhadur.4561:

Yeah I also believe Full might pertain to total characters in server rather then online. Crystal desert always full but lower levels zones feel empty, except on weekends. However considering the size of the world, plus dungeons and WvW and Pvp there is a lot of places people can be.

It doesn’t. The server population on the unofficial Oceanic server I transferred to is mostly full all the time except a couple of times per day in the off hours. There were very short windows for my guild and I to transfer.

Akiko.2364:

what happened to the 25th US server?

Never was one. See, 24/3=8. That’s 8 WvWvW pairings. A 25th server would be an odd-man-out and couldn’t exist without a 26th and 27th as well.

Siphaed.9235:

What would grandma rather get little Jimmy for Christmas: a $15-a-month 7-yr old game plus all expansions costing nearly $120, or a subscription free GW2 for $60 one-time box cost? That’s an easy choice for them to make.

Your numbers are way off. Please remove the prices or update them accordingly. GW2 is a lot cheaper as is WoW.

No offense, but to put it boldly, most people are just stupid and uneducated. They do not even think before sprouting non-sense based on their perceived subjective self instead of taking the time to analyze the situation.

Fact 1 : the popular servers are getting more popular as people tend to move to the already most populated servers. This is getting worse as ANet increases capacity for those select few servers.

Fact 2 : for the PvP savvy, it’s important for their server to be competitive, thus they move to the top 5 WvW servers which are often the most populated as well (but not always, see EU Seafarer’s Rest).

Fact 3 : Tyria is huge, it’s so huge even at max server capacity and with a good spread of characters, you won’t encounter many people in an entire zone besides Orr or the starting zones. This could be tweaked by using the overflow technology for “underflow” instead.

Personally I’ve found GW2’s crafting to be far more interesting than WoW. Plus you get XP for doing it. I just enjoy discovering the new recipes. I believe the only crafting profession that really requires a lot of materials and expense is cooking.

I’m on Yaks Bend. No matter when I play or which zone I’m in I always see people. I honestly think the people yelling there is nobody or game dieing are in two groups.

1) Want like 20 or more people around them no matter where they are at all times.

2) Shills for another game to hurt this game. Read up on it. A quick google search will find some interesting stuff. Do you know like 33 percent of reviews are intentionally bad made by the competition? You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.

The young think everything they read on the internet is gospel.

Another fun fact. Do you know it’s possible that wikipedia is inaccurate sometimes? It’s not always right.

By what I see game is fine.

Ptaki.3715:

2) Shills for another game to hurt this game. Read up on it. A quick google search will find some interesting stuff. Do you know like 33 percent of reviews are intentionally bad made by the competition? You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.

For a wonderful example of this, go to Massively and take a look at the comments for GW2 articles. Always the same paid shills, sometimes they will make a new account once their old one becomes known.

Renegadeimp.8439:

Go ingame and try to find all the players that actually make the cap “full”, or “high”. It seems to be the total number of characters per server or in that servers database, rather than the amount of people actually online at any given time.

Afk in Lion’s Arch, sPvP, ~500+ in WvW if there are queues, dungeons, etc probably account for the majority of that. More max level characters basically means more people spread out and also more in Dungeons, afk’ing LA, or doing sPvP/WvW where they’re not PvE’ing.

I think what everyone is forgetting to input when doing their calculations are all the bots currently clogging the PVE and WvW zones.

This is getting dumb right now. Trying to transfer to a different server and it’s full 24/7. 6am, 6pm — it don’t matter.

I’m spending more time in character select than endgame.

here’s my experience, even on full server like Tarnished Coast or SoS, you still wont get to see a lot of people outside LA or WvW, you will see some people maybe, but just not enough for me to call it a “full server”

I stopped doing map-pve content in this game long ago, especially those non-human lvling zones, as most of them are epmty. Right now i spent most of my time in WvW, it makes me feel like i am still playing a MMO.

game population is “healthy and growing”? don’t kid your self lol

Ptaki.3715:

I’m on Yaks Bend. No matter when I play or which zone I’m in I always see people. I honestly think the people yelling there is nobody or game dieing are in two groups.

1) Want like 20 or more people around them no matter where they are at all times.

2) Shills for another game to hurt this game. Read up on it. A quick google search will find some interesting stuff. Do you know like 33 percent of reviews are intentionally bad made by the competition? You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.

The young think everything they read on the internet is gospel.

Another fun fact. Do you know it’s possible that wikipedia is inaccurate sometimes? It’s not always right.

By what I see game is fine.

not sure if you are trolling but if you are not, the fanboyism is strong in this one

1) since most the server is listed as High or Full for ALL THE TIME, of course people are expect to see more than 20 people around them most of the time, we are playing a MMO for Melandru’s sake.

2) right, every legit concerns are intentionally made by evil competitors, are you wearing a tin foil hat?

Once the main push through the leveling content has been done by the majority the leveling areas (especially the mid-level zones) always become sparse of players. Every MMO with level specific areas sees this.

I can recall vast amounts of time going through the mid levels (esp Outlands) in WoW and never seeing a soul, beyond those flying by. Of course with WoW’s quest design this was preferable :P

But the effect is pretty common place and is why Blizzard added Cross-realm zones and why ANet needs to add an “underflow” system for its zones. Especially since GW2’s event system shines when there is a healthy amount of people in the zone.

I agree with others that those ratings must be based on the number of characters on the server. For example, the first guild I joined consisted of 17 players, and I am the only one of those players still active in any meaningful way. I would be amazed if that guild were the exception to the rule.

Siphaed.9235:

Why are there topics demanding server mergers, demanding a shorter transfer limitation, and saying “this game is dying” and “people are leaving”?

Most people are just reacting to their own personal experience in the game. The server selection screen is irrelevant to that.

@OP

Because apparently this is everyones first MMO and it’s common sense that people don’t chill in starter zones, but the end game ones. (but they don’t know that)

Rpgtabbycat.5869:

Personally I’ve found GW2’s crafting to be far more interesting than WoW. Plus you get XP for doing it. I just enjoy discovering the new recipes. I believe the only crafting profession that really requires a lot of materials and expense is cooking.

I agree with this statement. GW2 crafting is one of the best I’ve seen. I have 400 in all but 4 crafts on one character. The discovery feature is my favourite aspect

I believe it has 3 reasons.
1. The game is very big and it requires massive amounts of people to seem filled
2. Reaching level 80 is a breeze, so most people are in end-game zones, dungeons and WvW and
3. “Full” probably means the number of accounts allowed on the server has been reached. There is no sub and so people will not feel obliged to be active.

“US” servers… Look further then the end of your nose please. Take a look at Far Shiverpeaks (the server I am on) During the week the place is a ghost town. It only gets better from 8-10 pm (which is logical), but still I have never encountered a MMO that was getting deserted after one month.

I have no surprise believing they are full. I am on Crystal Desert, and there are always tons of people in LA with some smaller clumps in the other cities. Without fail. Orr, too, often has at least one decent-sized zerg running around in its three zones.

While I run across other players pretty often while leveling a character who are also out killing things or completing maps, I also run across AFK players in random places all over, as well. It’s difficult to gauge how many people are actually logged in merely based on map chat and who you might see.

And if you add in all of the silent, non-speaking bots that are hanging out in significantly large groups in various zones throughout the world, I’d wager that adds up similarly to the huge throngs of players in the starting areas we all saw in the first week or two.

I don’t understand why people estimate server population by number of players they meet in low-level zones.

Most of the server population now in high-level zones, dungeons and WvWvW.

Siphaed.9235:

Why are there topics demanding server mergers, demanding a shorter transfer limitation, and saying “this game is dying” and “people are leaving”?

If you like something, you’Re uncool. If nothing ever satisfies your high standarts, you’re cool. Threfore, everything around you has to be failing, dying, not be good enough.

Seeing doom and gloom is so much cooler than simply having fun at something. When I log on, I see a guild that’s growing, people playing, I have fun doing… whatever I happen to do that night.

I must be shallow and easy to please.

I just logged into the WvWvW of Far shiverpeaks. 3/4 were completely empty. Logged into LA maybe 10-15 ppl there. Went to cursed shore, plinx uncontested, penitent lost, shelter lost, Arah gate lost. Spamming for Karma farming party = no results.