Guild Wars 2

You should really let us have free transfers for a limited time, just like back in the old days. I have friends who are extreme casuals and I been spending gold to help them catch up, so barely any gold to help them transfer. It would be a good way to reward veteran accounts and get old friends together to get ready to play the expansion together.

I know you can do it Anet there was no restriction for a while on transfers at the beginning and then they became free for over a week at one point in time. So please just make it a limited time like you have in the past.

Outside of WvW it doesn’t matter what server you are on due to the megaservers.

However the reason they don’t allow it is because of WvW and spying, stacking, etc.

Unless you mean NA to EU type transfer, which is another story.

And the free transfers is why there is such a population imbalance in WvW.

And due to the megaservers, only WvW has the requirement to be on the same server. So I really doubt they’ll open up free transfers. Except maybe to the lowest populated WvW server.

Seera.5916:

And the free transfers is why there is such a population imbalance in WvW.

And due to the megaservers, only WvW has the requirement to be on the same server. So I really doubt they’ll open up free transfers. Except maybe to the lowest populated WvW server.

You are correct but there are other factors too.

the first reason for the imbalance is tournamanents. The reward for each tournament has been different, but they all had one thing in common. The reward was better if you where on a winning world. So it has been “interesting” to be on a winning world.

The second reason is indeed that they added mega-servers. There was a time that you would stick to your world cause your friends where there. with megaservers it doesn’t matter anymore, so join the winning team.

Only the third reason is the free tranfer, It was before the mega servers they offered it and not after. It wasn’t good, but that had nothing to do with megaservers, but with people wanting to be on the winning team.

I agree though that free transfers are in the past.

I’m still for a forced redistribution of players once every few months. In basic how it works is that entire guilds and individuals can choose what world they want to be based on. There is a limited amount of spots on each world (on a come first base). The amount of room you take depends on your value (some fancy math to decide in all fairness how much your guild represents based on your amount of members and their cumulative WvW ranks, same for individuals.
After the face where you can register, you get to choose, you can choose between the world you picked individually or the ones your guilds picked.
Due to the fancy math, not everyone gets to be on the best world. if the fancy math is done right, there will be enough choice to be on a world where you have a good chance, but no garantee you will win.

Icelin.8412:

You should really let us have free transfers for a limited time, just like back in the old days. I have friends who are extreme casuals and I been spending gold to help them catch up, so barely any gold to help them transfer. It would be a good way to reward veteran accounts and get old friends together to get ready to play the expansion together.

I know you can do it Anet there was no restriction for a while on transfers at the beginning and then they became free for over a week at one point in time. So please just make it a limited time like you have in the past.

• ANet made free transfers available at launch because that was the only way that they could fulfill their promise that we could play with friends. Originally, the game didn’t allow guesting and didn’t include megaservers, so two friends on different worlds could not play together at all without free transfers.
• The lack of ‘free’ transfers isn’t the reason that some servers are full and others aren’t — clearly plenty of people have moved to the Tier 1 servers, which have been the most costly.
• As stated above by others, with megaservers, choice of world only matters for WvW.

I’d prefer for ANet to add some incentives for people to leave high-pop servers — right now, it costs money to do that, so I can’t imagine that anyone would willingly leave.

mercury ranique.2170:

Seera.5916:

And the free transfers is why there is such a population imbalance in WvW.

And due to the megaservers, only WvW has the requirement to be on the same server. So I really doubt they’ll open up free transfers. Except maybe to the lowest populated WvW server.

You are correct but there are other factors too.

the first reason for the imbalance is tournamanents. The reward for each tournament has been different, but they all had one thing in common. The reward was better if you where on a winning world. So it has been “interesting” to be on a winning world.

The second reason is indeed that they added mega-servers. There was a time that you would stick to your world cause your friends where there. with megaservers it doesn’t matter anymore, so join the winning team.

Only the third reason is the free tranfer, It was before the mega servers they offered it and not after. It wasn’t good, but that had nothing to do with megaservers, but with people wanting to be on the winning team.

I agree though that free transfers are in the past.

I’m still for a forced redistribution of players once every few months. In basic how it works is that entire guilds and individuals can choose what world they want to be based on. There is a limited amount of spots on each world (on a come first base). The amount of room you take depends on your value (some fancy math to decide in all fairness how much your guild represents based on your amount of members and their cumulative WvW ranks, same for individuals.
After the face where you can register, you get to choose, you can choose between the world you picked individually or the ones your guilds picked.
Due to the fancy math, not everyone gets to be on the best world. if the fancy math is done right, there will be enough choice to be on a world where you have a good chance, but no garantee you will win.

Never said the reason for the imbalance was due to the megaserver. Just that with the megaserver the only reason we have a home world is WvW. And due to the issues free transfers cause for WvW, ANet isn’t likely to offer them again.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I’d prefer for ANet to add some incentives for people to leave high-pop servers — right now, it costs money to do that, so I can’t imagine that anyone would willingly leave.

Some incentives for moving to low-population servers would be good. It’s extremely rare for me to enter WvW, but thanks to PvE bonuses given to players on winning worlds, I’d hesitate to switch off of my current server (Jade Quarry) even if it were free.

I have a second account that I rarely use any more. I really don’t want to invest any more money into this account so a free transfer to a low tier server would create a vacancy for someone to move to a tier 1 server.

Redenaz.8631:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I’d prefer for ANet to add some incentives for people to leave high-pop servers — right now, it costs money to do that, so I can’t imagine that anyone would willingly leave.

Some incentives for moving to low-population servers would be good. It’s extremely rare for me to enter WvW, but thanks to PvE bonuses given to players on winning worlds, I’d hesitate to switch off of my current server (Jade Quarry) even if it were free.

If it’s rare for you to enter WvW, you aren’t affecting the population for JQ. It looks at whether you play and also how often. The incentives would have to be for people who spend e.g. 30%+ of their time in WvW. (I don’t know if ANet counts people who just go there for banking/crafting.)

I’m on the Henge of Denravi server and remember the time of free transfers. A bunch of guilds decided to go there and push it to the top of the lists for WvW. After they had done that, they left. WvW for that server crashed and burned and it’s taken a long time for it to recover enough to get to the middle ranks.

http://taugrim.com/2012/10/30/the-decline-of-henge-of-denravi-due-to-server-transfers-in-gw2/

No, no free transfers available to all. It’s bad for WvW.

That’s true, but for people who do WvW, the current state seems even worse, since they’re actually involved with how well their server is doing, and care more than I do how well their team does.

There’s a very good chance I don’t understand the Power of the Mists reward table, or how World Score is calculated, but it seems to me there’s a reasonably strong incentive to be on a high-ranked world, in addition to the expected “people like winning” incentive.

Is the rating on the WvW rankings table not the same as world score? Does the bonus not change depending on what rank your world is overall, just how well you’re in that week’s match?

Redenaz.8631:

That’s true, but for people who do WvW, the current state seems even worse, since they’re actually involved with how well their server is doing, and care more than I do how well their team does.

There’s a very good chance I don’t understand the Power of the Mists reward table, or how World Score is calculated, but it seems to me there’s a reasonably strong incentive to be on a high-ranked world, in addition to the expected “people like winning” incentive.

Is the rating on the WvW rankings table not the same as world score? Does the bonus not change depending on what rank your world is overall, just how well you’re in that week’s match?

The Power of the Mists score is based on how well your server is doing in its matchup, not on whether you have a high-ranked server. The more points scored, the more PotM, regardless of whether the server “wins” T1 or “loses” T3 in any given week and points are reset at reset. Until recently, pretty much all kitten, and T3 servers tended to end up with similar scores each week, if for no other reason than that the tiers have been static.

Arbitrarily, I took TC (currently 3rd in Tier 1) and Henge of Denravi (currently 1st in Tier 3). Out of the last 3 months, I counted (per MosMillenium) how many times each world earned more than 170k, enough to reach the 7th threshold of rewards (the max is 9, which no one reaches consistently):

• TC: all of them
• HoD: all but two

In other words, there’s nothing specific to being lower ranked that precludes the higher PotM rewards — it’s solely a matter of whether your world earns points quickly.

The wiki explains the rewards in detail:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists

(The use of the word ‘tier’ is misleading, since it has nothing to do with competitive tiers, only with whether your world has past the threshold necessary for earning the next level of bonuses.)