Guild Wars 2

This is more appropriately a question for the Devs. Doubt anyone else would know.

Do players who have been perm banned still count towards a server’s population?

If they are, shouldn’t they be removed and the slots opened for others?

Permabanned accounts include accounts that were hacked and used for gold selling and botting. Since the account holders can, even years later, appeal to support and be reinstated it’s unlikely they will ever be removed from the server they are on. Even accounts that are permabanned by actions of the account holder have been known to get this reversed.

We don’t know exactly how accounts affect server population. We only know that server population isn’t based off of people currently logged in, it’s based off of accounts attached to the server. Do accounts not count when not logged in for 3, 7 or 60 days? We don’t know.

@Astral Projections – that’s unfortunate because it seems that even now those banned account are using ‘space’ in the server which could be used for an active player. It doesn’t matter for PVE of course. But in WvW where population is, if not one of the strongest metrics for success? It matters a lot!

If these accounts are still being counted towards population, I’d like to request Anet to consider moving them out of each server’s count. Perhaps allow them to re-choose a server again if ever reinstated? Pretty sure most folks will not risk perm-ban to get a free transfer.

Doesnt the “full”, “high” status mean the current online players instead of total population?

In WvW, they usually do a blackout (lot of people log out at same time) to lower it from full to high so other guilds can transfer in.

I would imagine they have a hidden server that banned accounts are linked to. If they ever restore a banned account, they can just re-associate it to the proper server.

Accounts that haven’t logged in within the last year+ probably aren’t factored into the population. Once in a while ArenaNet adjusts the numbers, causing all full servers to become high, all high to become medium and so on.

NTDK.4897:

Doesnt the “full”, “high” status mean the current online players instead of total population?

As far as I know that’s how most mmos handle it, but it’s not like that in GW2.
It’s been confirmed by two different Anet posts.

The account is banned but not deleted. If one claims the account was hacked, wouldn’t be possible to restore the data from a deleted account. I’ve many accounts blocked for gold spamming, hacked accounts, which most, now, apparently the real owners, are in control of them.

About the blackout, as stated such thing doesn’t exist on GW2. I’ve told many times that if one needs proof, just check low pop servers you would clearly see the pop changing all the time, which isn’t true. Furthermore, Anet already stated they do maintenance on the servers from time to time where they manually adjust the cap.

I’ve been blocking gold sellers since beta. It looks like their data drops off after about a month or so of inactivity. Not sure where that data goes, however.